Overview
- URIs
- Example of W3C "linked e-mail data"
- Contrast to Facebook
- FOAF (FOAFNaut)
- Show off FOAF Facebook App
- Yahoo Search Monkey, Linked Data
- OpenID
What is the Web?
Technical Foundations
- hypertext (html)
- hypertect protocol (http)
- link identifiers (uri)
The Internet vs. the Web
Message vs. Links
The Web could be implemented on top of another kind of message-routing system beside the Internet.
A Document With Links
A Links to a Mail Message
The Linked Message
A Link Back to Data (issue tracking)
And back again to report on status of issue (email as data input)
Data integrated back into issue tracking system
I want my data back
Much of Web 2.0 is based on walled gardens, otherwise known as data warehouses
Users create content, and possibly value, often for free, but they lose control of their data and where even their data is.
Virtual Schizophrenia
ClaimID: Your data is spread throughout the online world...and mostly not under your control
Opening the Social Graph
(Some) users and developers want to stop having to re-invite their friends and to control their own data.
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..
Danny Ayer's Video
Two Stories
Moving Data requires:
- 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, so far.
- 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 a tremendous upswing in implementation

Myspace, Facebook, and OpenSocial
Similar to "browser wars," there now are competing ways to share social graph data on the Internet.
- 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
- Facebook: The dominant player in the social networking world, has mysterious plans to offer "Facebook" connect.
The State of Play
Our Friendships Cross Social Networking Sites
Data is Trapped Within HTML!
Applications are only as good as the data they can access.
Unfortunately, most data is trapped in idiosyncratic HTML!
or in databases behind firewalls...
Liberate the data and put it in a common universal format for accessing by our Web 2.0 applications?
The Semantic Web
... is an open world and universal space for
machine-readable data.
To a computer, then, the web is a flat, boring world devoid of meaning...This is a pity, as in fact documents on the web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them...Adding semantics to the web involves two things: allowing documents which have information in machine-readable forms, and allowing links to be created with relationship values.
TimBL, WWW1994
URIs
The Web as a Totalizing System
Increasingly all data is on the Web: a universal information space
This specification does not limit the scope of what might be a
resource; rather, the term "resource" is used in a general sense
for whatever might be identified by a URI. Familiar examples
include an electronic document, an image, a source of information
with a consistent purpose (e.g., "today's weather report for Los
Angeles"), a service (e.g., an HTTP-to-SMS gateway), and a
collection of other resources. A resource is not necessarily
accessible via the Internet; e.g., human beings, corporations, and
bound books in a library can also be resources. Likewise,
abstract concepts can be resources, such as the operators and
operands of a mathematical equation, the types of a relationship
(e.g., "parent" or "employee"), or numeric values (e.g., zero,
one, and infinity).
IETF RFC 3986, URI Generic Syntax,January 2005 by Berners-Lee et. al.
The Return of the Link
Hypertext links web-pages via the use of a URI at the target.
The Semantic Web just allows us to link anything that has two URIs

- The Resource Description Framework (RDF)
- abstract syntax, formal semantics
- standard encoding in XML
- emerging programmer-friendly short-hand encoding: N3/turtle
<http://www.example.org/Harry#> foaf:name "Harry Halpin";
<http://www.example.org/Harry#> foaf:homepage <http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin>.
Note the relationship to HTML links, especially with the
re-discovery of the rel attribute.
Semantic web includes tables, trees...


... and tangly messes

RDF data...

...merges just like that.

Subject and object node using same URIs
Links Join Across Different Sources of Information

Verb/predicate/Property using same URIs
The Semantic Web Does Social Networks: FOAF
FOAF: Friend of a Friend - see
FOAF Project
One of the earliest and most popular Semantic Web vocabularies.

RDF markup for
Person, mbox, homepage, workplaceHomepage, schoolHomepage, knows and also for things that we are in or make, like
primaryTopicOf and
depicts.
Linked in a (semantic) Web to other FOAF files and arbitrary RDF Data.
Designed to be independently extended without breaking due to using RDF technologies.
Data Portability Using FOAF
Getting Started with FOAF
You can create a FOAF file with
FOAF-o-matic.
There are already great tools out there, like
foafnaut.
Check out Alexander Passant's foafmap.net mash-up of FOAF and Google Maps - here's me.
You can generate FOAF from Facebook profiles automatically using Matthew Rowe's FOAF Generator Facebook Application
We need to integrate privacy and trust issues with FOAF
You (Likely) Already Have a URI
Log-in once. No more "I forgot more password and username"!
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:
href="http://openid.claimid.com/hhalpin">http://openid.claimid.com/hhalpin
ClaimID gave me an OpenID...so can many others...
Sound familiar?
Tim Berners-Lee: "The Architecture of the World Wide Web says that everything of importance deserves a URI. Go ahead and give yourself a URI. You deserve it!"
OpenID in a Picture
OpenID is taking off!
See this great
OpenID tutorial, from which we took this list and other details:
Just the start - AOL.com now has an OpenID for
everyone of their users, and Mozilla has announced OpenID support..
estimated 120 million OpenID users
Go use your OpenID (list from LifeWiki
- Egofolio.com is a tool to help you keep track of content you create across any number of websites. Friends can keep up with you and all of your online activities in one page.
- Tanga.com lists daily deals and user-contributed games and puzzles.
- smallmarble.org collects country-specific colloquialisms, idioms, and practice phrases, including audio recordings of native speakers, all available under a Creative Commons license.
- iTaggz.com - a FREE online bookmark manager. You can tag/categorize your favorite web pages and access them from any computer - be it at home, work, school...
- LiveJournal.com now accepts OpenID logins both for general site sessions through a login page and for one-off comments without an associated login session.
Linked Data
The Semantic Web in Yahoo!'s Search
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.
The Future

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, OpenSocial...),
Can the major vendors commit to one web of social data? (Can W3C help?)
W3C Social Web XG

Allows a much-looser and quicker moving form than a Working Group for exploratory purposes, allows creation of a Working Group in a year to be sped up!
Can be a forum inside the W3C to get the diverse bodies interested in social networking communicating.
Harmonize and stabilize relevant standards and think through privacy and identity issues with the Semantic Web.
Anyone can join as an Invited Expert and completely open - contact me or Dan Brickley.
If a W3C Member - interested in joining or co-sponsoring group?
We need social scientists and social networking experts!
Starting
around October - help us create the
charter on a wiki
Parting Thoughts

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