The Pragmatics of the Social Web

Harry Halpin, <H.Halpin a! w3.org>

June 30th 2009

Starting Thoughts

gutenberg I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

William Morris. A Dream of John Ball

Current State of Play for Social Networks

Walled Gardens

Social networking users are trapped in walled gardens where they cannot share data with others unless they are on the same social networking site or use the same vendor-specific API.

FOAF has not solved this problem and many major social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Twittr) are not exporting FOAF (yet!)

So if that's the Semantic Web's most successful ontology so far, we have a ways to go!

Everyone makes mistakes!

Re: proposed new tag: IMG

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@www3.cern.ch)
Fri, 26 Feb 93 14:04:55 +0100

Maybe in reply to: Marc Andreessen: "proposed new tag: IMG"


I had imagined that figues would be reprented as

<a name=fig1 href="fghjkdfghj" REL="EMBED, PRESENT">Figure </a>

where the relation ship values mean

EMBED Embed this here when presenting it
PRESENT Present this whenever the source document
is presented

Note that you can have various combinations of these, and if
the browser doesn't support either one, it doesn't break.

A see that using this as a method for selectable icons means nesting
anchors. Hmmm. But I hadn't wanted a special tag.

Social Networking as the new browser wars...

Social Networking very similar to browser wars... Walled Gardens

Social Networks are Global

Social Network Global Map

Opening the Social Graph

facebook pic
  1. Ordinary people
  2. Developers
  3. Businesses
  4. Academics doing data-mining

Myspace, Facebook, and OpenSocial

Walled Gardens
  1. OpenSocial Alliance: Started by Google and Myspace, and endorsed by Yahoo! and virtually all the minor players. Open Source implementation: Shindig
  2. Facebook: offers "Facebook" connect. Microsoft has a large amount of shares in Facebook.

Current State of Play for Tech

companies

Two Stories

twitter login The Social Web requires:
  1. The Privacy Story: How can you use a single login to securely access multiple services, both to download, modify, and upload social data?
  2. The Social Graph Story: How do we actually get the social graph, merge with others from different services, and query graphs.
  3. Context Story: How can this data be personalized to produce great applications (mobile social networking)

A Rose by another Name

roses

Developers tend to want to access their work via the use of APIs and not data formats.

But data formats are a great way for users (and compaines!) to store, share, and even sell their social data.

More expansive than traditional data, including data such as calendars (scheduling meetings), reviews (reviewing movies), to-do lists, shopping (booking an airplane), genealogies.

Extensisible data formats seems similar the idea behind the Semantic Web... including a data model for merging heterogeneous data, constraints, and querying.

Privacy and Trust

The largest unsolved problem is identification and privacy on the Web.

Just publish all your data on the Web (Linked Data) will not work for sensitive social data.

semantic web

Main Questions

The two questions are:

  • Can the W3C provide a forum to help existing widely deployed technical solutions become accessible, internationalized, and decentralized?
  • Can the major vendors commit to a common set of best practices?
  • FOAF OAuth FOAF

    Social Web Incubator Group

    How's a girl to choose? Totally public and encouraging individual participation, all work done on public list-serv and all meeting minutes public.

    Open Invited Expert policy: You still have to sign Royalty-Free agreements in order to edit the specifications.

    So YOU can get involved! Bi-weekly talks with leading edge techology from outside the W3C as well as inside.

    Right now, over 60 members ranging from industry to academia to non-profit sector..

    Data-Driven Development

    What can future work in this area learn from recent HTML5 WG developments?

    Data-Driven: People are using XFN microformats and vCard and soon OpenSocial moreso than FOAF. We need to have mappings between XFN, FOAF, between VCard (hCard) and OpenSocial's schema.

    Instead of policy languages, look at a Policy Commons built off actually deployed privacy options wanted by users and/or deployed by social networking sites (Work by Soren Preisbusch and Josh Bonneau of Cambridge).

    Lots of data coming in via mobile phones, look at how we can access that data in a uniform way (geolocation API, work of Nathan Eagle)

    A Wittegensteinian Theory of Semantics

    Ludwig Wittgenstein

    All terms in a language (are given meaning by their use with other terms, and these parasite off the meaning of natural language terms, and the use of language-acts in accomplishing real-world tasks.

    Inference in general can not constrain interpretation enough to prevent ambiguity (See In Defense of Ambiguity paper by myself and Pat Hayes.

    Meaning as use can be quantified and formalized as statistics over large data-sets (ala Google!) see work by Margaret Masterman.

    See the criticism of Karen Sparck Jones about the Semantic Web: "What's New About the Semantic Web?": Different domains do share vocabularies and words can mean different things, but they are similar enough that we can communicate.

    Likely Solutions

    Likely that we can create a common data-driven semantic and extensible model (based on FOAF) that maps to the data existing APIs export and import.

    Likely that we can use the W3C to investigate technologies that want to be standardized under the W3C organization, ala "open social microblogging".

    Would be nice but unlikely that we can get a default or recommend existing APIs (OpenSocial, Microsoft Contact API, Facebook Developer Platform)

    The W3C will not produce a single monolithic technology architecture for the Social Web.

    The W3C should not force the use of the Semantic Web unless when it fits the use-cases.

    Technologies to Know

    openwebfoundation

    Most of the innovation in the Social Web is happening outside the traditional Semantic Web research and outside the W3C.

    There's a whole new generation of people building a pragmatic "little-s" semantic web...and it's bigger than the Semantic Web we've been working on right now!

    Identity Commons

    We need to get involved with the community around the Identity Commons and the upcoming Open Web Foundation.

    OpenID

    Log-in once. No more "I forgot more password and username"! openid

    OpenID is a way of a user "logging-in once" to a service provider and then having their log-in details be verified by a trusted identity provider.

    Your new OpenID username is a globally-unique URI:

    a href="http://openid.claimid.com/hhalpin">http://openid.claimid.com/hhalpin

    ClaimID gave me one...so can many others...

    Sound familiar?

    Tim Berners-Lee: "The AWWW says that everything of importance deserves a URI. Go ahead and give yourself a URI. You deserve it!"

    How does OpenID work?

  • Service Provider fetches HTML from User OpenID URI to discover identity provider.
  • 
    <html><head>
    <meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://openid.claimid.com/hhalpin/xrds" />
    <link rel="openid.server" href="http://openid.claimid.com/server" />
    </head><body>
    <p>OpenID identity page for hhalpin</p>
    </body></html>
    
    
  • Establishes shared secret code with identity provider, using Diffie-Hellman key exchange.
  • Redirects the user to the identity provider
  • If user can log-in or is already logged in, the user is redirected back with their identity verified.
  • See this great OpenID tutorial, from which we took this list and other details: Just the start - AOL.com and Yahoo now has an OpenID for everyone of their users, and Mozilla and Microsoft have announced OpenID support.. Estimated 120 million OpenID users

    Go use your OpenID (list from LifeWiki)

    OAuth

    OAuth is a standard way for developers to offer their services via an API without forcing their users to expose their passwords or credentials. oauth

    Built in support for desktop applications, mobile devices, set-top boxes, and of course websites.

    OAuth prevents it by explicitly asking you if you want to let Facebook grab your details from the provider. While OpenID 2.0 providers (using OpenID Attribute Exchange) may hold general information about you (avatar photo, addresses, phone numbers) that it can with your consent to service providers so users don't have to re-enter profile details, it's not really extensible on a Web-scale or meant to compete with OAuth.

    XRDS-Simple

    XRDS

    Came from OASIS XRI committee, but luckily now seized by Eran Hammer-Lahav (Yahoo!) and drops XRIs because it's "politically sensitive" (as, Eran mentions, is RDF. Used by OpenID 2.0, replacing YADIS.

    After all, how hard can it be to list a bunch of URIs and add some descriptions next to each one? The only issue is agreeing on some format that everyone can understand and implement. In developing a discovery protocol, we are trying to answer two questions:
    1. How to find information about a resource through its URI?
    2. What format is this information provided in?

    Provides a simple XML format to say "The resource identified by this URI can be contacted by a phone number, they have these other identities on social networks"

    The W3C Royalty-Free Patent Policy

    troll One problem is without a patent policy we might inadvertently build a software patent into our standard.

    Having a patent in supposed open standard that companies unwittingly implement is an instant business plan for troll.

    For examples, see the conflict over XNS (now XRIs) in the W3C, which led to the development of the W3C's patent policy.

    Royalty-Free might discourage both large corporations with huge numbers of patents from participating...but social data portability is only going to work if everyone comes to the table honestly and openly.

    OpenSocial

    OpenSocial Different APIs done with Javascript and HTML:
    1. People and Friends (people and relationship information)
    2. Activities (publishing and accessing user activity information)
    3. Persistence (simple key-value pair data for server-free stateful applications)
    How does this work with W3C Widgets?

    Now Google Wave (XMPP) and Opera Unite are on the radar...

    Portable Contacts

    diso logo Work primarily done at Plaxo, a contact company that has lots data...

    This API defines a neutral protocol for Consumers to request address book, profile, and friends-list information from service providers that matches what most social networking sites are together.

    Also specifies an XML and JSON-based address book format...could this replace FOAF?

    Builds on top of vCard, works with OAuth, XRDS-Simple, OpenSocial...

    Foundation of DISO (Distributed Open Social Networking)

    Microformats

    Just embed limited vocabularies in span and div tags. Has worked well, has larger mindshare in Web 2.0 developers (and maybe larger size!) than the Semantic Web. Deployed by major sites, so XFN is deployed by Twitter.

    Chris Messina on the Semantic and Social Web: I just haven't seen a lot of real-world applications developed using the technology. There's stuff that happens kind of in the medical realm and there's very specific applications in places like that...but it just feels like you have to do a whole lot more work to get the same level of benefits that you’d get out of just using microformats on the one hand...

    On user-interfaces:It occurred to me that what he (Berners-Lee) was showing me was very similar to Facebook but kind of like from a 1993 perspective...and I'm like, "This is really great that you can do this stuff. But you haven’t actually provided me with a more compelling user experience that’s going to help me sell this stuff to anybody but you"

    On well-formed syntax (much less semantics!): It's really hard to get people to publish well-formed HTML... so, if you actually think that people are going to publish well-formed RDF, I think that you’re kind of naïve to the way that stuff actually gets out there.

    And this is from an ally: Well, you're going to have to ask more politely to get it. You've got my URL, now, tell me, what else do you really need?

    Yahoo! and Google's RDFa

    From Yahoo's Open Search Strategy: Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like RDF, or even microformats. We believe that app can be web search...we plan to support vocabulary from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others. ... we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages.

    And as of a few weeks ago, now indexed by Google IF they use Google-specific RDF However, note Google's interest is also in microformats.

    yahoo semsearch

    HTML5, RDFa, and Microdata

    semantic web The hip Web world is moving away from XML in general, and not quickly towards RDF, but towards Javascript and HTML as a Web-based operating system.

    RDF has a definite advantage: People want to describe products like MP3 player's price. It's very hard for a search engine to extract these properly from a table.

    RDFa is viewed as overly-complex by many in the HTML5/WHATWG WG, and so while the editor Ian Hixie has his own simpler microdata proposal.

    XML namespaces are not used in HTML5. One reason is even in RDFa people mistype namespaces, so some type of Link Registry is needed.

    The Future: Maybe Not How We Envision It...

    The first predecessor of the Web was the NLS (OnLine System) made by Douglas Engelbart in the 1960s-1970s. A good idea takes four decades to mature, and they change a lot. Early WWW article

    But the problems stay the same...

    Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity....

    By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. (Douglas Engelbart)