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. It has recently achieved significant adoption
through its usage in a variety of commercial and open-source software
applications, and is commonly used in conjunction with the FOAF
vocabulary for expressing personal profile and social networking
information. By becoming a standard way for expressing user-generated
content from such sites, SIOC enables new kinds of usage scenarios for
online community site data, and allows innovative semantic
applications to be built on top of the existing Social Web. The SIOC
ontology was recently published as a W3C Member Submission, which was
submitted by 16 organisations.