Leveraging Existing Web Frameworks for a SIOC Explorer to Browse Online Social Communities

Since online Semantic Web applications are based on existing Web infrastructure, developing these applications could leverage experiences with and infrastructure of existing frameworks. These frameworks need to be extended to deal with the different nature of Semantic Web data. We introduce several extensions to the Ruby on Rails Web development framework to support Semantic Web application development, and demonstrate them by developing a SIOC explorer. This online application integrates information from heterogeneous communities, allowing users to explore this information and find relevant posts and topics across these sites without the need to manually visit the different sites.