DERI research day
Yesterday, I spent the day at the DERI research day. DERI, as you will recall, is the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, based in Galway.
There were a number of interesting speakers, including Professor Stefan Decker, the centre director, Professor Manfred Hauswirth the recently appointed vice-director, and a number of the DERI researchers.
One presentation that particularly stuck with me was that of John Breslin who I’ve mentioned here before. John is one of the senior researchers in DERI, and much of his recent work has been on a software component called SIOC – Semantically Interlinked Online Communities. SIOC is one of a number of tools that DERI are working on that is trying to “make the semantic web real”. In effect, it is a very simple semantic “ontology”: for online content such as posts to blogs, forums, bulletin boards, mailing lists, etc.
However, thankfully, John and his colleagues are not just developing theoretical ontologies, there’s real software behind the ideas. One piece that I’ve used myself on another site that I manage is a plugin for WordPress. This is a standard plugin for WordPress, which, when installed, generates the SIOC semantic data for your blog. Well worth a look.
I haven’t had much of an opportunity to play with the actual data that is generated, but I can sleep easier knowing that I’m doing my bit to help populate the semantic blogosphere.
Somewhat ironically, there is not yet a SIOC exporter for Typo, the blogging engine that I’m using for this site. Maybe I should look into that myself…