Reusing the SIOC Ontology to Facilitate Semantic CWE Interoperability

Due to the increasingly large volumes of data that today's businesses handle, effective data management is a key issue to be addressed. An important aspect of data management is data interoperability, or the ability of information systems to exchange data and knowledge. Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs) are fundamental tools for supporting data interoperability within the scope of a particular project or within a team of eProfessionals collaborating together. However CWE users may partake in multiple projects hosted on different platforms, or a particular project may be distributed over multiple CWE platforms. Therefore, it would be advantageous to be able to share and combine data from several independent CWEs. Currently, CWE platforms remain informational islands, with data expressed in a proprietary format. To address this data heterogeneity challenge and enable CWE interoperation, data must be structured in a semantically interpretable format. In this paper, we propose to reuse Semantically Interlinked Online Community (SIOC) to facilitate semantic CWE interoperability. Once proprietary CWE data is annotated with the SIOC ontology, it becomes interpretable by external CWEs. Based on this, the CWE Interoperability Architecture has been designed. Following this architecture, we developed the SIOC4CWE Toolkit, which allows the exporting, importing, and utilization of SIOC data.