DataPortability and Me: Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Semantic Web

DataPortability and Me Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Semantic Web John Breslin http://www.johnbreslin.com/ 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 move from one to another * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Enabling users to easily bring their data with them * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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!

(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 file system for data
The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces 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
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 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/

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

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

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

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

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.)

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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DataPortability and Me: Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Semantic Web

by John Breslin on Mar 31, 2008

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DataPortability and Me: Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Semantic Web — Presentation Transcript