Foaf Openid Milan

Slide 1: FOAF, OpenID & the Social Web Milan, May 12th 2008 danbri@asemantics.com danbri@danbri.org

Slide 2: Convergence ’08: 1997 Social Networks 2000 [Semantic] Web Identity 2004 “Web 2.0” Portability 2008 ... the Social Web

Slide 3: How did we get here? Rise of the ‘social network’ site Parallel rise of key ‘open’ technologies 2008 is the year it all opens up... Brief history of the Semantic Web project briefer history of Social Network sites impact of OpenID and OAuth

Slide 4: In the beginning... ...was the Web

Slide 5: “To a computer, the Web is a flat, boring world, devoid of “For example, a document might describe a person. meaning. This is a pity, as in fact documents on the Web The title document to a house describes a house and describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give also the ownership relation with a person.” 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. [this will] help us exploit the information to a greater extent than our own reading.” Tim Berners-Lee "W3 future directions" keynote - 1st World Wide Web Conference Geneva, May 1994

Slide 6: Web pages describe the World Each makes ‘claims’ They can disagree ... Web pages reflect a (complex) world

Slide 7: The Semantic Web project: ‘let machines use the claims made in Web pages’ what objects do they describe? what relationships do they claim? who made the claims? what other claims support them? Convergence ’08: Who made the claims? (OpenID) What about private data? (OAuth) Better publishing in HTML? (Microformats/RDFa) Querying all this data? (W3C SPARQL)

Slide 8: A is for... F OA F M F H P O S C XM P P K A F L E O L V S N N S P S I OC A D A R D F OA U T H Q O L H C A R D M C

Slide 9: Terms (vocab) F OA F H P S C XM K A F L O L V N S E S I OC A T O HC A R D M C

Slide 10: Infrastructure (neutral) M F O XM P P E S N P I A D A R D F OA U T H Q O L M

Slide 11: livejournal.com VOX Social Network services evolve...

Slide 12: Widgets/apps code visits data Open data data visits code

Slide 13: FOAF is a project about sharing information in the Web. It's about ways of describing things using computers, so that those descriptions can be linked together, mixed up with other data, and searched. Friend of a Friend People, groups, accounts, photos, IM, life on the Web. Machine-readable pages, de-centralised, freely extensible.

Slide 14: Everyone’s connected? Don’t say it, show it: ...the evidence friendship leaves in the world and Web Work. Fun. Beer. Travel. Writings. Events. Music. Photos. Life. “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”- Harvey Pekar

Slide 16: Image description example: Not just buddylists, but the things we make and do.

Slide 17: Group description example: Not just people, but the groups they are members of my.opera.com www.livejournal.com

Slide 18: Data-merging example: Henry says, “My name is ‘Henry Story” Joe says, “I know Henry who knows Jane” Joe knows someone called “Henry Story”

Slide 19: FOAF support in Apple MacOSX Safari:

Slide 20: Tabulator, a FOAF-aware browser:

Slide 22: Scaling to the Web?

Slide 23: Oracle “Oracle Spatial 11g introduces the industry's first open, scalable, secure and reliable RDF management platform. Based on a graph data model, RDF triples are persisted, indexed and queried, similar to other object-relational data types. Application areas include Social Network Applications, Friend of a Friend applications, social network tracking and navigation common in security and intelligence applications” (competing with e.g. OpenLink and numerous opensource systems)

Slide 24: FOAF/XFN in Google Social Graph API: 'The Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the web more easily available.' Based on open standards ... Google “currently indexes the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.”

Slide 25: FOAF/RDFa in Yahoo search 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

Slide 26: Social Graph browser:

Slide 27: OpenID & OAuth Wired: “Taken together, OpenID and OAuth establish an open, reusable means of turning the whole web into your own personal social network.” Sign-in with a URL Identify buddies with URLs Inter-site data permissioning system Richer infrastructure for cross-site integration

Slide 28: What can we do today? Migrate profiles between sites Use OpenID to label source of claims Use FOAF & Microformats to describe owner of OpenID Use Google SG API to find old friends on new sites Navigate unified ‘Social Graph’ with alternate UI

Slide 29: User experience impact? OpenID is a learning experience... Reduce email-based “add a friend” noise Less work to enter and enjoy a new ‘social’ site User education needed re privacy exposure More focussed, specialist sites (travel, music, food, tv, events)

Slide 30: Greater than sum of parts? OpenID gives Identity not Trust FOAF/RDF gives claim-based description, not Trust Linked data approach allows Trust to flow If you are sure about ‘danbri.org’, and danbri.org claims same owner as danbri.livejournal.com, ... you have a basis for believing claims from the latter. (Google SGAPI does just this)

Slide 31: What can we expect tommorrow? Focus moving from individuals to groups: super-connectors will link sites communities will spread across sites Evidence-based friend lists: Identified by OpenID. Described by FOAF/XFN. people I send mail to Shared with OAuth. people I work with Syndicated with RSS/Atom. members of my family Notified via XMPP. Searched by Yahoo/Google/...? people in my city Data flow; implicit groups; offsite filtering

Slide 32: Questions? OpenID: <http://danbri.org/>