FOAF for Social Network Portability

Slide 1: FOAF for Social Network Portability Uldis Bojars (captsolo@gmail.com) WebCamp on Social Network Portability Cork, Ireland - March 2, 2008

Slide 2: Introduction Uldis Bojārs @ DERI Galway • FOAF - topic of this talk • SIOC - what I am working on

Slide 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

Slide 4: Friend of a Friend Information about: • Person • Social Network / Relations • Groups

Slide 5: Friend of a Friend Information about: • Person • Social Network / Relations • Groups (multiple) • ... and more ...

Slide 6: Richer Info Needed? • RDF allows us to combine FOAF with other vocabularies • XFN, Relations vocabulary, ...

Slide 7: Richer Info Needed? • RDF allows us to combine FOAF with other vocabularies • XFN, Relations vocabulary, ... RDF = Information, Concentrated

Slide 8: Richer Info Needed? • An example - Morten’s FOAF profile: http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/author/mortenf/

Slide 9: Social Network Portability Components (data): • A way to identify a person (across sites) - privacy • A way to describe a social network - relations between people

Slide 10: Identifying Properties • E-Mail address (private) • Hash of e-mail (semi-public) • URLs (public) • ...

Slide 11: Social Network Portability Components (tools): • Tools / Services (do the actual “magic”) • Data providers - opening up social media sites • Data users / consumers

Slide 12: Workflow 1. Parse FOAF data (from Site A) 2. Extract a list of friends and some data for identifying them 3. Compare this identifying data with a registry of users on Site B, report matching users

Slide 13: Parsing FOAF data? Python: import RDF # using Redland Python bindings (librdf.org) m = RDF.Model() m.load('http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf')

Slide 14: Finding Friends? :) SPARQL: SELECT ?person ?mbox WHERE { <danbri> foaf:knows ?person . ?person foaf:mbox ?mbox . }

Slide 15: Case Study: LiveJournal • Data about a person (FOAF) - ✓ • Social network (FOAF) - ✓ • Identifying information ... Difficulty: this data (foaf:mbox_sha1sum) is spread across friends’ profiles. Must be collected together before use.

Slide 16: Distributed Social Information • What about using Flickr, Twitter, ... account URLs as identifyers? - Identifying properties are only useful if other sites also knows this data - Entering all the URLs again and again?! • Describe these accounts once - Applications can get this info from your homepage (e.g., described in FOAF)

Slide 17: http://apassant.net/blog/2008/01/12/one-foaf-fits-all/

Slide 18: Open Questions • Who owns this information? • You should have ability to backup and reuse your social network info (you own the data!) • Privacy • ... ... ...

Slide 19: Thank you! • http://wiki.foaf-project.org/FAQ • http://captsolo.net/info • #webcamp (look for more info tagged “webcamp”)