2008 DataPortability.Creative Commons with Attribution.

dataportability.org

DataPortability and Me

Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Semantic Web

John Breslinhttp://www.johnbreslin.com/

DataPortability Lunch Meetup in London6th April 2008

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So many social media sites…

* Source: Smashcut Media, www.smashcut-media.com

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Even more services…

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It takes a lot of time…

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Filling out your profiles, re-adding your friends…

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Uploading posts and content items to “stovepipes”!

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Social media sites are like data silos

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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Many isolated communities of users and their data

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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Need ways to connect these islands

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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Allowing users to easily move from one to another

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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Enabling users to easily bring their data with them

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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What if I use multiple services and I want to…

• Move the stuff I have on one service to another (e.g. move all my blog posts, comments, friends, etc. from WordPress.com to “Acme Blogs”)

• Move all my stuff from multiple services to one third-party service

• Centralise my stuff on my own service, e.g. my blog• See my stuff on a third-party service providing an

aggregate view, like FriendFeed

• Need data portability!

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(De-)centralised me

14…that connect you to other people

Control your data: these are the social objects…

• Discussions• Bookmarks• Annotations• Profiles• Microblogs• Multimedia

…

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The philosophy of DataPortability

• As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors

• We need a DHCP for identity, a distributed file system for data

• The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together

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The mission of DataPortability

• To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end data portability

• To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community

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The phases of DataPortability

1. Foundation

2. Invitation

3. Investigation / Research

4. Design / Documentation

5. Evangelise

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Using existing technologies, inventing no new ones

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Other initiatives “near” DataPortability

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Social networking fatigue

• How many general or niche SNSs are you willing to register and / or interact with?

• People search engine and aggregation sites are now appearing to compensate:– SocialURL – organise your online identities– PeekYou – matching web pages with their owners– Spock – organising information around people– Rapleaf – reputation lookup and email search– Wink – free people search engine– FriendFeed – subscribe to all of your friends’ feeds

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Social network portability and reusability

• Need distributed social networks and reusable profiles• Users may have many identities and sets of friends on

different social networks, where each identity was created from scratch

• Allow user to import existing profile and contacts, using a single global identity with different views (e.g. via FOAF, XFN / hCard, OpenID, etc.)

• See also:– http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/– http://danbri.org/words/2007/09/13/194– http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/

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Semantics can help

• By using agreed-upon semantic formats to describe people, content objects and the connections that bind them all together, social media sites can interoperate by appealing to common semantics

• Developers are already using semantic technologies to augment the ways in which they create, reuse, and link profiles and content on social media sites (using FOAF, XFN / hCard, SIOC, etc.)

• In the other direction, object-centered social networks can serve as rich data sources for semantic applications

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The Semantic Web for dummies

• XML customised tags, like:– <dog>Nena</dog>

• + RDF relations, in triples, like:– (Nena) (is_dog_of) (Kimiko/Stefan)

• + Ontologies / hierarchies of concepts, like:– mammal -> canine -> Cotton de Tulear -> Nena

• + Inference rules like:– If (person) (owns) (dog), then (person) (cares_for) (dog)

• = Semantic Web!

* Sources: Text by Stefan Marti; Picture by Duncan Hull

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FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend)

• FOAF is an ontology for describing people and the relationships that exist between them

• Can be integrated with any other SW vocabularies• Some services with FOAF exports:

• People can also create their own FOAF document and link to it from their homepage

• FOAF documents usually contain personal info, links to friends, and other related resources

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Integrating social networks with FOAF for reuse

Common formats,unique URIs

* Source: Sheila Kinsella, Applications of Social Network Analysis 2007

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SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities)

• A schema for representing users, forums, posts and threads, containers, and other items in online community sites, for reuse and interoperability:– Aims to fully describe the structure of content in these sites– Also to create new connections between forums and posts from

different types of discussion systems (blogs, forums, mailing lists, etc.) and content items / containers on Web 2.0 sites

– And to browse connected posts and channels in interesting ways (e.g. distributed linked conversations, decentralised discussion channels and communities, etc.)

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Quotes about SIOC

• “I […] think the concept is HOT” – Robert Douglass, Drupal Developer

• “It just dawned on me that the burgeoning SIOC-o-sphere (online communities exporting and exposing content via SIOC Ontology) is actually: Blogosphere 2.0” – Kingsley Idehen, Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software

• “SIOC has the potential to become one of the foundational vocabularies that make Semantic Web applications useful” – Ivan Herman, W3C / ERCIM

• “A project that started back in 2000 called Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) represents relationships between people, as well as basic contact details. SIOC does this for groups: it extends the FOAF idea to being able to talk about whole groups of people. I am excited about SIOC because you can use that information to determine trust, to let people in.” – Tim Berners-Lee, Creator of the World Wide Web

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The SIOC RDF ontology (important terms)

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SIOC and other ontologies

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Using SIOC and FOAF to represent portable data

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1. SIOC metadata exporters have been created for open-source / commercial discussion systems and popular Web 2.0 sites:• b2evolution, Dotclear, Drupal, phpBB, WordPress, mailing lists, IRC,

Twitter, Jaiku, aggregators, OpenLink Data Spaces, Talis Engage, etc.

2. Easy-to-use APIs have been produced for writing your own SIOC applications in PHP, Ruby on Rails and Java

3. As well as nearly 20 academic papers about SIOC and a W3C member submission (http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02/), easy-to-read documentation and usage examples are available:• http://sioc-project.org/

• SIOC aims to infect the Web infrastructure:– During next upgrade cycle gigabytes of community data

become available!

Getting traction for SIOC

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SIOC in use (~50 implementations, applications)

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• We have lots of producers of SIOC data, but now we need to build more applications that can consume it, like this WordPress importer:– Just as WordPress can import blog entries from various blogging

systems, the SIOC importer can import any discussion posts represented in SIOC (forum posts, mail messages, IRC chats)

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Porting social media contributions from data providers to import services

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Join the DataPortability and SIOC projects!

• http://dataportability.org • http://sioc-project.org

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Ownership, control, freedom at opensocialweb.org