Mike’s Digital Laboratory

My next experiment is to “plug in ” to the Semantic Web. Tonight I installed some new tools from sioc-project.org to enable a SIOC feed from my blog.

What is SIOC? The SIOC initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF.

First I installed Semantic Radar for Firefox. If you’d like to experiment with SIOC, and other RDF feeds, I’d recommend this tool. It’s easy to install and it automatically detects semantic data at any site you visit. Secondly if you leave the default options set every RDF feed you encounter will be sent to http://pingthesemanticweb.com/ where it is collected and stored in a larger repository. (One of many that make up the emerging semantic web)

Ok, cool so now I can detect RDF. Next I wanted to actually generate RDF from my web site with two goals in mind. One to generate an RDF feed representing my blog and all my posts. And two, to produce RDF (FOAF) feed representing the primary Author of the site, namely me.

To accomplish this I installed the SIOC exporter for Wordpress. This little tool is the product of those Deri.org genius minds Uldis Bojārs and Sergio Fernández. Installation is easy, I just dropped in couple of files in my Wordpress plugin directory and poof it’s done. Hey it works with no fiddling. If you are looking at my site now with Semantic Radar installed you should see some RDF feeds and should easily be able to browse them. If not you can try this link to the SIOC browser. Ok, so I said it works without fiddling. But of courae I had to fiddle. First of all if you haven’t noticed by now I’ve changed my site name. In reality I have actually restored it to what it was two years ago just before my blog fell into the great state of disrepair that lasted so long. (But we don’t talk about that) What’s important about that is that I wanted a “title” and “description” in the RDF based on the site name and tag line. I actually wanted the description to read “Mike Axelrod’s Weblog and not the title. Anyway, that did not quite work. Instead I found the title being repeted in the description field. Aha! It’s not a bug it’s an opportunity. So a code hacking we go. Here is the fix if you want to try this:

In the file sioc-include.php change line 605:

before:

$rdf .= “\n\t” . ‘<dc:description>Weblog: ‘ . htmlspecialchars(get_bloginfo(‘name‘)) . ‘</dc:description>’;

After:

$rdf .= “\n\t” . ‘<dc:description>Weblog: ‘ . htmlspecialchars(get_bloginfo(‘description‘)) . ‘</dc:description>’;

That’s as messy as it gets, and it’s an optional step to take. The only other messing about for me was to fine tune my semantic content. For example I discovered the “bio” section of my Wordpress user account is used to create the description field for the RDF that represents me as an individual (SIOC/FOAF data). After fixing that up by adding a little bit of a bio I felt satisfied.

Ok, looks good, it works, but what’s this all mean? What’s the big picture here? Well I believe it means that this data about me and my site is now harvestable and shareable in a standard format that plugs into any ontology. And of course it plugs into the great “Web ontology” that is the Semantic web, the web of “meaning”. Looks like it’s here and it’s real and I am now part of it.

Huzzah!

Update 8/13/08: Apparently I forgot to comment on this. The following day my ranking in Google shot up to the number 2 spot when searching on my own name. Prior to this experiment I had to go back several pages of Google results to find my own blog. So Apparently Google is paying close attention to RDF tags. I checked again today and my site is now the number one search result when searching on my name. Nice, SEO persistence. I like it.