‘One Big Happy Family’
Dan Brickley, microformats vEvent,
London 27 May 2008
danbri@danbri.org

Problems & non-problems
Facebook
fragmented social Web
Google
‘war etc.’
censorship
more than 1 way to do it
global warming
disagreement
needless data entry
too many friends
silly disagreements

If we can’t learn to disagree nicely...
...we’re all screwed.

“Humanity is a tangle, which the
Web lets us see...” (TimBL ‘08)
photo credit:
Hamed Saber (Iranian Flickr users meetup)

In the real world, people are kept apart by distance. Because of the vastness of
the earth, different cultures have developed. People live in separate countries,
divided by boundaries and sometimes by walls with soldiers and guns.
On the Web, people come together - they connect - because they care about
the same things.
The real world is about distances keeping people apart.
The Web is about shared interests bringing people together.
David Weinberger, ‘Small Pieces Loosely Joined (for kids)’

Group hug. Back to reality.
“RDFa is microformats done right.”
“MFs are very un-web-like...”
MFs are... “real world”... “beyond academics and theoretical
discussions”
MFs aren’t... “a panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other
such abstractions”
“...defining the whole world, or even just boiling the ocean”

“They just don’t get it.”

Group cringe.
Can we do this better ?
‘We’ ?

a slippery word
“We...”

“There are two kinds of people
in the world, those who believe
there are two kinds of people in
the world and those who don't.”
Robert Benchley, Benchley's Law of Distinction

Them and Us
XML ‘vs’ RDF
Semantic ‘vs’ Syntactic
Academic ‘vs’ Commercial
Practical ‘vs’ Theoretical
Naïve ‘vs’ Wordly
Dataportability ‘vs’ OpenID

But there’s only one Web
activists standards
lawyers entrepreneurs
researchers liars writers
hackers
usabilitists
So we all do our bit. students
journalists
troublemakers scientists
XML
academics
accessibility funders
criminals *-ologists
politicians logicians designers ...
marketers ... librarians ...
bloggers

Back to the future...
Some RDF, Semantic Web, FOAF history.
Perhaps context helps understanding.
Similar goals, complementary methods?
Shared experiences...

1989
In the beginning...
...was the Web

“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

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

Henry says, “My name is ‘Henry Story”
Joe says, “I know Henry who knows Jane”
Joe knows someone called “Henry Story”

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)

More RDF/SW history

1996
Warwick Framework
History gets lost.
“...allows the designers of individual metadata sets to focus
Time flies. on their specific requirements, without concerns for
generalization to ultimately unbounded scope
Memory fades. It allows the syntax of metadata sets to vary in
conformance with semantic requirements, community
practices, and functional (processing) requirements for the
kind of metadata in question.
It separates management of and responsibility for specific
metadata sets among their respective \"communities of
expertise\".
It promotes interoperability by allowing tools and agents
to selectively access and manipulate individual packages
and ignore others.”
Carl Lagoze, D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1996
RDF’s motivating history is hidden away...

1996/7
Meta Content Format (MCF)

structured chaos
incrementally extensible

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.

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

Common SW themes
Decentralised ‘division of labour’.
Data merging architecture.
Pluralism.
No central control on vocabulary.
Domain-neutral infrastructure.
Dealing with data fragmentation.
(6 ways to say the same thing?)

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.”

FOAF/RDFa/MFs 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

Digression: practical stuff
Three things to collaborate on.
1. parser testing & datamodels
2. databases and querying
3. inclusive vocab & UI

Parser interop
RDF’99: world of pain
RDF’04: pain gone away
Can we share a test-case methodology?
‘What claims does this page make?’

Truce?

datamodels? jCard etc.

Queries & claims: SPARQL
PREFIX xfn: <http://gmpg.org/xfn/11#>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
SQLish. SELECT * WHERE {
GRAPH ?g1 { blah-blah-blah }
Claim-centric. GRAPH <http://danbri.org/> { blah-blah-blah }
}
Webby.
Used in RDFa test suite.
We can compare the claims made by versions of a
document, or between different documents...

M/F?
“In most cases the foaf:gender value will be the string
'female' or 'male'”
“...not intended to capture the full variety of biological,
social and sexual concepts” associated with the word
'gender'.”
Great. But how do I do this with HTML forms?

Back to the sermon
Habits to avoid:
‘what they don’t get is...’
‘our tech is more semantic/
extensible/simple than their tech’
Gloating. Uncharitability. Oneuppery.
Framing disagreement as conflict.

Common values
Love of the Web; as it is, and as it could be.
A concern for decentralised data. Gradual
progress. Small steps and collaborative work.
Machines doing the things they’re best for. Pages
that can be treated as data.
Web standards. Accessibility. HTML. Re-use,
creativity, hacking. A more Social Web.
Small pieces, loosely joined.

TODO.txt
Read ‘their’ blogs, email, wiki, IRC.
Have a bit of empathy.
Play with ‘their’ tools, data, specs.
For fun.
Try saying ‘we’ instead of ‘they’.
Coming up: W3C Social Web Incubator Group

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