data accessibility and me: introducing sioc, foaf and the linked data web

2008 DataPortability.Creative Commons with Attribution.

dataportability.org

Data Accessibility & Me :-)

Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Linked Data Web

Adapted from: John Breslinhttp://www.johnbreslin.com/By: Kingsley Idehen URI: http://community.linkeddata.org/person/kidehen2#this

DataPortability Lunch Meetup in London6th April 2008

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So many social media sites…

* Source: Smashcut Media, www.smashcut-media.com

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Even more services…

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It takes a lot of time…

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Filling out your profiles, re-adding your friends…

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Uploading posts and content items to “stovepipes”!

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Social media sites are like data silos

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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Many isolated communities of users and their data

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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Need ways to connect these islands

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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Allowing users to easily access their data across services via Hyperdata Links (URIs)

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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Enabling users to easily reference their data from anywhere

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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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!

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(De-)centralised me

14…that connect you to other people

Control your data: these are the social objects…

• Discussions• Bookmarks• Annotations• Profiles• Microblogs• Multimedia

…

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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 :-)

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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

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The phases of DataPortability

1. Foundation

2. Invitation

3. Investigation / Research

4. Design / Documentation

5. Evangelise

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Using existing technologies, inventing no new ones

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Other initiatives “near” DataPortability

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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

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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/

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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

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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

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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

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Integrating social networks with FOAF for reuse

Common formats,unique Data IDs (URIs)

* Source: Sheila Kinsella, Applications of Social Network Analysis 2007

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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!

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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

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The SIOC RDF ontology (important terms)

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SIOC and other ontologies

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Using SIOC and FOAF to represent portable data

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1. 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.

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

3. 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

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SIOC in use (~50 implementations, applications)

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• 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)

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Porting social media contributions from data providers to import services

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Join the DataPortability and SIOC projects!

• http://dataportability.org • http://sioc-project.org

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Ownership, control, freedom at opensocialweb.org