Social Network Portability: Is the Semantic Web Ready?

Harry Halpin, <H.Halpin a! ed.ac.uk>

RDF

June 2008

Opening the Social Graph

Users and developers want to stop having to re-invite their friends. facebook pic

Users are increasingly wanting more and more powerful applications to access their social data - and having that data behind a firewall just won't do in 2008.

The DataPortability.org to the rescue..

Is This The Big Opportunity for the Semantic Web?

Data portability is also the idea behind the Semantic Web FOAF One of the first vocabularies for the Semantic Web is obvious: Friend of a Friend!

Today, the Semantic Web now features stores scaling up to billions of data documents and APIs for major programming platforms...but it appears to be a solution in sort of a problem!

Why isn't the Semantic Web being established as silver bullet!

A Rose by another Name

For example...

roses

Using OpenID to access the data portability.

Work needed to be done to integrate OpenID into the Semantic Web stack!

Two Stories

Social Data Portability requires:
  1. The Authentication Story: How can you use a single login to securely access multiple services, both to download, modify, and upload social data? OpenID is the best story with an upswing in implementation
  2. The Social Graph Story: How do we actually get the social graph, merge social graphs from different services, and query graphs. RDF has the best story, with lots of tested software implementations

data portability

Myspace, Facebook, and OpenSocial

Similar to "browser wars," there now are competing ways to share social graph data on the Internet.

  1. OpenSocial Alliance: Started by Google and Myspace, and endorsed by Yahoo! and virtually all the minor players in the social networking world. Open Source implementation: Shindig
  2. Facebook: The dominant player in the social networking world, has mysterious plans to offer "Facebook" connect. Microsoft has a large amount of shares in Facebook.

Obviously a W3C-approved Semantic Web compatible standard way of doing this would be ideal.

The State of Play

claimid

The Data Portability Group

data portability

Has been tremendously successful - over a 1000 subscribes, action groups, and every single major vendor from Google to Facebook has joined.

Seems to soon be based on an OpenID-like model, but has currently evolving structure.

Clearly putting the word out and attracting interest - mostly from developers, and those who see their business model based on providing applications for portable social graphs instead of forcing users to recreate them.

FOAF Moving Social Graphs In a Slide?

Is it possible to use FOAF for the data story?

FOAF

Role of the W3C

w3c

Seen is slow, semi-closed, and old-fashioned - surely not the place for hip Web 2.0 developers and entrepreneurs! And we all know standards by committee are a disaster...

The W3C would be useful would to ratify, double-check, and flesh out corner-cases for existing standards that are created by a small and fast-moving group!

An optimal solution would be for the DataPortability.org to create a working technical solution over the next year, and then the W3C to ratify it through a Working Group.

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 XRIs (used in some ideas about data portability!) 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.

Getting Started

Help think through the Semantic Web story for moving open social graphs.

Stabilize relevant standards such as FOAF, VCard/OWL, and think through the interface of OpenID with the Semantic Web.

Complements the OpenID story being told by Data-Portability.org and can explore into other stories, such as those based on APIs and XML.

Anyone can join as an Invited Expert and completely open.

If a W3C Member - interested in joining or co-sponsoring group's initial take-off?

Help us create the charter on a wiki

The Social Web XG

girl cartoon This is the first semi-official announcement!

Allows a much-looser and quicker moving forum than a Working Group for exploratory purposes, allows creation of a Working Group in a year to be sped up!

Can push practical social data portability work and communicate with other groups.

A litmus test for companies deciding if they are going to make their work to be royalty-free or not.

The Future

semantic web There is no technical reason why the social data in your e-mail account is kept artificially separated in your mobile phone, your social networking site, blog ...

The two questions are:

  • What will the technical solution be? (OpenID, FOAF...),
  • Can the major vendors commit? (Can W3C help?)
  • The first easy-to-use application that let people manage their social data across these services are going to make a large splash...

    Parting 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