Data Accessibility and Me: Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Linked Data Web

Data Accessibility & Me :-) Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Linked Data Web Adapted from: John Breslin http://www.johnbreslin.com/ By: Kingsley Idehen URI: http://community.linkeddata.org/person/kidehen2#this DataPortability Lunch Meetup in London 6 th April 2008

So many social media sites… * Source: Smashcut Media, www.smashcut-media.com

Even more services…

It takes a lot of time…

Filling out your profiles, re-adding your friends…

Uploading posts and content items to “stovepipes”!

Social media sites are like data silos * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Many isolated communities of users and their data * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Need ways to connect these islands * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Allowing users to easily access their data across services via Hyperdata Links (URIs) * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Enabling users to easily reference their data from anywhere * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

What if I use multiple services and I want to…
Access (reference) the stuff I have on one service from another (e.g. mesh all my blog posts, comments, friends, etc. across my WordPress.com and “Acme Blogs”)
Make all my stuff from multiple services accessible to one third-party service
Centralise access to my stuff via my own service, e.g. my personal data space (comprised of blogs, Wikis, Bookmarks etc.)
See my stuff as part of the increasing mesh of Linked Data Sources on the Giant Global Graph
Need data accessibility!

(De-)centralised me

… that connect you to other people
Discussions
Bookmarks
Annotations
Profiles
Microblogs
Multimedia
…
Control your data: these are the social objects…

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 data space system for meshing data & identity
The technologies already exist, we simply need the demonstrations together :-)

The mission of DataPortability
To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end data portability & accessibility (hopefully!)
To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community

The phases of DataPortability
Foundation
Invitation
Investigation / Research
Design / Documentation
Evangelise

Using existing technologies, inventing no new ones

Other initiatives “near” DataPortability

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

Social network portability, reusability, and data accessibility
Need distributed social networks and reusable live profiles (linked data URIs + FOAF)
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/

Linked Data Helps!
By using agreed-upon shared vocabularies and schemas to describe people, content objects and the connections that bind them all together , social media sites simply become hubs within the Giant Global Graph
Developers are already using Linked Data 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 Linked Data applications

The Link Data Web for dummies
Give everything you observe (data) an ID
Use HTTP URIs (URLs + string pattern) to create Data IDs
Use your Data IDs to link to Data elswhere (as you do with Web page URLs)
Example:
http://community.linkeddata.org/dataspace/person/kidehen2#this
= Linked Data Web!
* Sources: Text by Stefan Marti; Picture by Duncan Hull

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 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

Integrating social networks with FOAF for reuse Common formats, unique Data IDs (URIs) * Source: Sheila Kinsella, Applications of Social Network Analysis 2007

SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities)
A schema for representing Linkded Data Spaces comprised of: people, weblogs, bookmarks, photo albums, calendars, discussions, addressbooks, social networks etc.:
Aims to fully describe the data objects across data spaces connected via the Web
Facilitates creation of new connections between people, places, events, weblogs, and other things (data/entities/objects) via the Web
Simplies creation and discovery of federated communities
Exposes the Giant Global Graph of Linked Data on the Web!

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

The SIOC RDF ontology (important terms)

SIOC and other ontologies

Using SIOC and FOAF to represent portable data

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

SIOC in use (~50 implementations, applications)

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)

Porting social media contributions from data providers to import services

Join the DataPortability and SIOC projects!
http://dataportability.org
http://sioc-project.org

Ownership, control, freedom at opensocialweb.org

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Data Accessibility and Me: Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Linked Data Web

by John Breslin on Apr 01, 2008

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Data Accessibility and Me: Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Linked Data Web — Presentation Transcript