Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF

Data portability has become an important requirement on the Social Web. This paper describes how data and social network portability can be achieved by building upon existing Semantic Web developments such as SIOC and FOAF. The SIOC project provides a common format for expressing user-generated content in a machine-readable form and tools for import/export of this information, while the FOAF vocabulary provides a format for interlinking users’ social networks. We demonstrate this approach on an example of a SIOC import plugin for WordPress.