Archive for the 'FOAF' Category

Interviewed for Data Portability article on PCWorld.com / WashingtonPost.com; SIOC mentioned

Published
by
Cloud
on 1/2/2008
in DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

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.)

XTech 2008, May 6th-9th 2008, Dublin, Ireland

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/1/2008
in Blogs, DERI, FOAF, General, Internet, Ireland, Podcasts, RSS, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0 and Wikis
. 3 Comments

Call for Participation for XTech 2008

Proposals for presentations and tutorials are invited for XTech 2008, Europe’s premier web technologies conference. The deadline for submitting proposals is January 25th, 2008.

XTech 2008 will be held from May 6-9th 2008, in Dublin, Ireland.

XTech’s theme this year is “The Web on the Move”, focusing on the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet. We will explore the benefits, issues, practicalities and fun of a web built on open standards, open source and commodity technology.

XTech presentations should inspire, educate and challenge. Your audience will be people like you, responsible for steering the technological direction of their organizations and the web as a whole.

Last year’s schedule can be viewed on the XTech 2007 web site.

Please direct any questions to the conference chair, Edd Dumbill.

View the calls for participation and submit a proposal

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Social platforms
    • Design patterns for social software
    • Social network interoperability
    • Internet application platforms (Facebook F8, OpenSocial, etc.)
  • Identity management
    • OpenID
    • Practical security
    • OAuth
  • Ajax
    • jQuery, YUI, other toolkits
    • Offline applications
    • Comet
    • Professional Javascript
    • Flex
  • The web of data
    • Collective intelligence
    • Semantic technologies
    • Search
    • Markup and meaning
    • Freebase, Twine, Google Base
    • The place of XML on the web
  • Data and databases
    • Client-side databases
    • REST-oriented databases (e.g. CouchDB)
    • XML and RDF
    • Messaging architectures
    • XQuery
  • Operations and programming
    • Web application frameworks
    • Virtualization and appliances
    • Application scaling
    • Multicore and concurrency oriented programming
  • Mobile devices
    • Commodity mobiles
    • Android, iPhone
    • Hardware hacking and personal prototyping
    • Geolocation
    • Getting the mobile mindset

(Note: DERI will be a co-host of this event.)

DataPortability.org, web standards, SIOC and FOAF

Published
by
Cloud
on 4/1/2008
in FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software and WebCamp
. 0 Comments

Leo Sauermann has written an e-mail to the public DataPortability.org mailing list suggesting that the DataPortability.org initiative also takes W3C’s web standards like RDF into account, as well as considering existing efforts like FOAF and SIOC for data portability on the social web. The initiative’s chairperson Chris Saad has indicated that they will put all related communities and standards in context, including RDF (and I assume FOAF and SIOC too).

As co-founder of the SIOC project, I’ve recently been evangelising the fact that SIOC can be used to provide a representation of all content items created by a person (via their user accounts) on various social media sites, and this can be nicely combined with the FOAF profile of that person who holds the associated user accounts (click on the picture below, and see our Internet Computing article for more).

20080104a.png

In the image, Bob holds user accounts on various social websites (two shown for clarity, but here’s another view), and via those accounts he creates content items (usually within containers of some sort, e.g., in a bookmark folder, personal weblog, message board or image gallery) on those sites. He should be able to port not only his social graph (in this case, his connections to Alice and Carol), but also his personal containers / sets of content items and perhaps even associated comment replies. The vocabulary terms are shown in dark grey: foaf:knows, sioc:User, etc.

It’d be great if we can get some of the DataPortability.org people to come to the WebCamp workshop on Social Network Portability in Cork in March. There are some valuable contributors to the initiative so far including Chris Saad, Ashley Angell, Paul Jones, Chris Messina, Ben Metcalfe, Daniela Barbosa, Phill Morle, Ian Forrester, Shashank Tripathi, Kristopher Tate, Paul Keen, Brian Suda, Emily Chang, Danny Ayers, Marc Canter, Jeremy Keith, Peter Saint-Andre, Robyn Tippins, and Robert Scoble.

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere, part 6

Published
by
Cloud
on 30/11/2007
in Blogs, DERI, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

Here are the latest happenings from the world of SIOC during the past few months, with thanks to all involved in supporting the initiative! (Note to new readers that SIOC is an open data format for community description.)

Opening up the social graph at the WebCamp workshop on “social network portability”

Published
by
Cloud
on 27/11/2007
in Blogs, Cork, FOAF, Internet, Ireland, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web 2.0 and WebCamp
. 0 Comments

20071127b.png

A WebCamp “Social Network Portability” workshop has been announced to be co-located with BlogTalk on 2nd March 2008. You can view the wiki page for this event.

“Social network portability” is a term that has been used to describe the ability to reuse one’s own profile and contacts across various social networking sites and social media applications. At this workshop, presentations will be combined with breakout sessions to discuss all aspects of portability for social networking sites (including accounts, friends, activities / content, and applications).

Topics of relevance include, but are not limited to, social network centralisation versus decentralisation, OpenSocial, microformats including XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and hCard, authentication and authorisation, OpenID single sign-on, Bloom filters, categorising friends and personas, FOAF, ownership of your published content, SIOC, the OpenFriend format, the Social Network Aggregation Protocol (SNAP), aggregation and privacy, permissions and context, and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

You can register for this workshop in conjunction with BlogTalk 2008. If you are interested in speaking or otherwise participating in the workshop, please add your name under the Speakers or Participants headings on the wiki page at http://webcamp.org/SocialNetworkPortability.

At the International Semantic Web Conference in Busan

Published
by
Cloud
on 13/11/2007
in DERI, FOAF, Korea, SIOC and Semantic Web
. 2 Comments

I arrived in Busan on Sunday evening for the 6th International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea. Busan is a great big place with three million people; very impressive as you drive into the city from the airport.

Yesterday, I chaired the 2nd International ExpertFinder Workshop (or FEWS, “Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics”), where we had six interesting and varied papers. The workshop had about 35 attendees, and this bodes very well for future events. We also had a meeting about the ExpertFinder initiative for FOAF afterwards. Thanks to the ISWC 2007 Metadata Chairs Tom and Knud, metadata from FEWS is available here.

From DERI, NUI Galway, both Tudor et al. (”SALT: Weaving the Claim Web”) and Andreas et al. (”YARS2: A Federated Repository for Querying Graph Structured Data from the Web”) have been nominated for the best student paper award. Best of luck to you! (With Hak-Lae et al., I also had a submission for the Semantic Web Challenge at the conference.)

20071112a.png

Last night, members from DERI Galway and DERI Seoul had dinner at a famous local fish restaurant. Sebastian snapped some great pictures of our meal, and here’s a video of something wriggling that he and Andreas bravely ate…

Some more images from Busan: a lovely sea view from the Paradise Hotel and a city view from the other side, a Japanese-style Captain Kirk toilet, and maybe butter is good for your heart.

New Friend-of-a-Friend diagram from danbri

Published
by
Cloud
on 6/11/2007
in FOAF, SIOC and Semantic Web
. 0 Comments

Saw this on danbri’s Flickr and his corresponding blog entry, a very nice concise diagram showing FOAF classes and properties (and some DOAP, GEO, OWL, SKOS, and SIOC too):

20071106a.jpg

The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics

Published
by
Cloud
on 2/11/2007
in FOAF, General, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks and Social Software
. 14 Comments

Stefan and I wrote an article entitled “The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics” for the IEEE Internet Computing magazine. It was published yesterday (1st November). You can read an extract and see a rendered copy below.

20071101f.png In the article, we describe how Jyri’s idea of object-centered / object-oriented sociality not only provides meaning to social networks, but also defines an application area for the Semantic Web in terms of representation mechanisms for interconnecting people and objects across different social networks.

20071101g.png We also propose a social networking stack that would allow the reuse of one’s personal profile, social network connections and content-creation history (e.g, using FOAF and SIOC) across various sites and applications (there’s some obvious crossover with the OpenSocial People and Activities APIs here).

Anyway, here it is:

The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics

“I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names… It’s not just big names — it’s anyone. A native in a rain forest, a Tierra del Fuegan, an Eskimo. I am bound — you are bound — to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.” — John Guare

Everyone on the Internet knows the buzzword social networking. Sites such as Friendster, Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn, Bebo, and MySpace, as well as content-sharing sites that also offer social networking functionality (including YouTube, Flickr, Upcoming, del.icio.us, Last.fm, and 43 Things) have captured the attention of millions of users and millions of dollars from venture capitalists. Compete.com states that, as of November 2006, the 10 most popular domains accounted for about 40 percent of all page views on the Web, and nearly half of those views were from the social networking services (SNSs) MySpace and Facebook.

SNSs usually offer the same basic functionalities: network of friends listings (showing a person’s “inner circle”), person surfing, private messaging, discussion forums or communities, events management, blogging, commenting (sometimes as endorsements on people’s profiles), and media uploading. With such features, SNSs demonstrate how the Internet continues to better connect people for various social and professional purposes. Yet, fundamental problems with today’s SNSs block their potential to access the full range of available content and networked people online. A possible solution is to build semantic social networking into the fabric of the next-generation Internet itself — interconnecting both content and people in meaningful ways.

…

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I think this article is timely given the unveiling of OpenSocial these past few days (we managed to reference the then forthcoming API in time for a section about “Your Social Graph” on page 3). But as Uldis and Daniel Feygin pointed out on the SNP mailing list, while OpenSocial addresses social application portability and widget developers nicely, it seems to miss out on tackling the issues of social graph portability and cross-network identity links.

David Emery highlights this closed social network problem: “OpenSocial doesn’t solve this, but if it had it could be truly revolutionary; if Google had gone after opening up the social graph [...] then Facebook would have become much more of an irrelevance – people could go to whatever site they wanted to use, and still preserve all the interactions with their friends (the bit that really matters).” Marc Canter says: “Me - I’m just sitting here, smiling and wondering about interop and whether all these platforms are really gonna open up their social graphs with unique identifiers. After waiting four years - who’s in a hurry?” And Bob Warfield says: “One of the biggest things will be portability of one’s social graph. Can I carry mine from one participating Social Network to the next? That’s a touchy business. [...] Who will be first to write an app whose sole purpose is to carry your identity and Social Graph from one network to the next?” Of course, not everyone wants their graphs to be portable or linked together - there may be very good reasons for isolation, but if OpenSocial could allow people to choose to link or reuse their profile / connections across sites (or not), I think it would be a leap rather than a step in the right direction.