Via Gareth Coen, I just heard about two events being held later this month - on the 27th and the 29th of February in Dublin and Belfast respectively - called xCellerate 2008. The central theme is “Bringing Silicon Valley to Ireland” and it is geared towards Irish technology startups. There will be angel and venture capital investors attending from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as successful Internet entrepreneurs on the panel. To receive a 40% discount on registration, use the code “web2″. (There is a small problem in that this event clashes with the Irish Web Technologies Conference at which I’m due to speak.)
Archive for February, 2008
I was very interested to hear about the launch of Google’s social graph API at the weekend. The social graph API “returns web addresses of public pages and publicly-declared connections between them”, where the connections are currently being obtained from crawled XFN and FOAF links. Dan Brickley, the co-creator of FOAF said:
The Google API looks like a step in a very interesting direction. Of course it will be possible to think of many things it doesn’t yet do, but I encourage everyone here to have a think about simple, practical and useful incremental improvements to it. We can do a lot more eg. with full SPARQL access, but proving full SPARQL to the aggregation of the planet’s public FOAF/XFN data isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Interesting times
In answer to Niall Larkin’s question about how this relates to SIOC, such services help us because by providing an easy method to find one’s social graph (both “me” and “knows” connections), it also makes it easier to find your social objects which can be described using SIOC (see my previous illustration, and see also Kingsley Idehen’s demonstration of how this can work).
In short, you can use FOAF to create the social graph, and use SIOC to represent social objects.
Not everybody is entirely happy (see the comments on Tim O’Reilly’s blog post), with the majority of objections being in relation to the APIs being operated by a for-profit as opposed to a non-profit organisation, and there is some opposition to the idea of a single point of control rather than having a set of distributed indexes.
Perhaps we need something similar to “nofollow” links for the public social graph as well. We will discuss these issues and some other important social network portability topics at WebCamp SNP in four weeks time.
Edit: What I can add to this is my gut feeling that it probably requires a company like Google to make an API that can gather the required momentum and that people will use; previous FOAF aggregator efforts like Plink and FOAFSpace could have done this, but they would have found it much harder to gain critical mass.
I attended an inaugural dinner last Tuesday for a proposed new association to represent those in the interactive digital content / media delivery and consumption space (thanks to Paul Walsh for organising, and to Microsoft / Blacknight for sponsoring). I was happy to meet some new people and to talk to many familiar faces at Jaipur (see Paul Campbell’s headshots).
As both an academic and a some-time developer, I was keen to see how third-level institutions and students could benefit from such an organisation, and I was also interested to find out how content providers such as boards.ie could represent their interests to other members, including mobile services and legislators. But I also tried to nail down in some manner what domain this association would target (ignoring the whole “name” issue): was it mobile content, web content, broadcast content, and was there a division or an overlap with other representative groups (IIA, etc.)? I didn’t get an exact response from anyone but I think this will evolve in the coming weeks…
More reports from Maryrose Lyons, Paul Campbell, Joe Drumgoole, Dennis Deery, and Paul Walsh himself.
I was interviewed recently as part of an article by Juan Carlos Perez for PC World about Data Portability, talking about synergies with SIOC (the article has since been syndicated by many media outlets including the Washington Post).
I think Juan wrote a balanced article which outlines the main goals of the initiative and addresses the worries that some companies are still unsure of what to expect. Since DP is just a few months old, it is therefore impressive that companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Plaxo and Digg are getting involved at this early stage.
For those who are unaware of the initiative, the DataPortability.org working group was recently established to look at ways in which data can be ported from one social media service to another. For example, one of their sample scenarios involves using the YADIS communications protocol to discover an identity for a particular person, which then returns a YADIS / XRDS document indicating which identities that person prefers to use and what services those identities are held on. Then, the WRFS abstraction model can be used to find out what containers the returned identities hold on those services.
SIOC is an ideal representation method for describing all content created by a person (via their user accounts) on various social media sites and the structure contained therein (see my previous post). One of the problems with combining social media data is in knowing exactly what accounts the user holds on different social media sites. As mentioned, YADIS / XRDS / WRFS can be used for discovery purposes, and the combination of the FOAF and SIOC vocabularies is particularly well suited to describe a person’s social network profile, their user accounts and the content items created using those accounts in various containers.
Yet SIOC is more that just a way to represent personal containers of data. I think that another task for the DataPortability.org workgroup is to discuss what methods can be used to port not just personal sets of data but whole sets of community data - especially for niche groups. SIOC was initially created to provide a way to describe the content from online communities (mailing lists, message boards, etc). While it was soon used for people’s blogs and more recently for other personal sets of Web 2.0-type content items, it has the concepts needed to describe the structure and contents of a community site as a whole. If someone runs a community site, and they decide that they want to port their group from one place to another, SIOC can be used to describe the structure (and content if combined with other vocabularies) of most community sites in order to re-create it on a different information system.
(Edit: The related workshop on social network portability will be held in Cork on the 2nd of March 2008.)
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