SemTech sessions related to data portability / IEEE Computing article on portable data

It’s been a busy few weeks for DataPortability.org with announcements from many sides including Google (Friend Connect), Facebook (Connect) and MySpace (Data Availability). Next week, the Semantic Technologies Conference will be held in San Jose, California, and you can bet that discussions around the need for portable data will be scattered throughout.

• On Monday, Stefan, Uldis and I will present a tutorial (which will also cover data portability aspects of ontologies such as SIOC and FOAF) entitled “The Future of Social Networks: The Need for Semantics“.
• On Monday evening at 8 PM, there will be an informal meetup of some DataPortability.org people in the Fairmont Hotel’s Lobby Lounge, so if you have an interest in data portability, feel free to join us.
• On Tuesday at 7:15 AM, I will chair a “Data Portability Interest Group” meeting. Attendees will include Chris Saad, Daniela Barbosa, Henry Story, and yours truly.
• Then on Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 PM, Jim Benedetto, Senior Vice President of Technology with MySpace will talk about “Data Availability at MySpace“.

Last month, IEEE Computing published an article by Karen Heyman entitled “The Move to Make Social Data Portable“. I was interviewed for the piece along with Michael Pick (social media expert), Duncan Riley (b5media), John McCrea (Plaxo), Craig Knoblock (ISI), Chris Saad (DataPortability.org), Dave Treadwell (Microsoft), Kevin Marks (Google), Chris Kelly (Facebook), Marc Canter (Broadband Mechanics), and Bill Washburn (OpenID). Technology solutions mentioned included RSS, OpenID, OAuth, microformats, RDF, APML, SIOC and FOAF. Here are my original answers to Karen’s questions.

DataPortability lunch meetup in London / OpenSocial hackathon

I attended the DataPortability lunch meetup in London on Sunday (see link to some photos above), where I met up with DP enthusiasts including Tom Morris, Tony Haile, Chris Saad (founder), Cassandra Shanks, Imp, Julian Bond, Christian Scholz, and Sokratis Papafloratos. We had some great food and interesting discussions, including DP scenarios, the scope of DataPortability (is it more than just the Social Web?), SIOC, forthcoming announcements, and more…

Tom, Christian and I went to the OpenSocial hackathon at the BT centre afterwards. I spoke with organiser Michael Mahemoff briefly, and Dan Peterson invited us to attend the forthcoming Google I/O event in May. I also listened in to Dan Brickley and Cassie discuss connections between FOAF and the OpenSocial APIs. (Unfortunately, I missed the presentations which were on in the morning before I arrived in London.)

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #7

It’s been three months since my last round-up of all things SIOC-ed, so here is entry number seven in the series:

• Version 1.0 of a SIOC API for Perl has been released on CPAN! The CPAN page for the SIOC API is here. A description of the project itself is available here. Thanks to Jochen Lillich, Thomas N. Burg, and also to Internet Privatstiftung Austria (IPA) for funding this work.
• A new RDF API module for Drupal has been announced that will include sub-classes / sub-properties of popular terms from SIOC, DC, etc. (Drupal creator Dries Buytaert has also said that an RDF API will appear in the core of Drupal 7; see this video.) Stephane Corlosquet has also made an RDF Schema proposal for Drupal (which includes SIOC) and has received very positive feedback. Some potential RDF use cases for Drupal have also been described.
• Gautier Poupeau has written a useful guide (en Français) on how to RDF-ise your blog in two parts: the theory and the practice. It uses RDFa and vocabularies including SIOC, SIOC Types, DC Elements, DC Refinements and XSD.
• SIOC data is now being produced by memoQ by Yuki Matsuoka and Hideaki Takeda of the National Institute of Informatics, Japan.
• Keith Alexander at Talis has described (and shown) how it is possible to create client-side Semantic Web applications using their Convert service. For example, on this page comments functionality is added to a section identified with a “sioc:has_reply” property using a short piece of embedded widget code.
• ASP.net developer John Dyer has written a nice post on DataPortability and its standards, talking about OpenID, FOAF, SIOC, APML, etc. Daniel Lewis has also written a good overview of DP. More recently, John announced the DataPortability pack for BlogEngine.NET that produces SIOC, APML and FOAF. BlogEngine.NET founder Mads Kristensen has also written about data portability and making an API to your website.
• OpenLink‘s Personal Data Space Explorer now also exposes SIOC, FOAF and other RDF data. See Kingsley’s post on linked data via FOAF and SIOC.
• Uldis Bojars, Alex Passant and I will present a tutorial entitled “Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web” at the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) in Beijing this month.
• I did an interview with SemanticWeb.com called “SIOC-ing the Semantic Web” in January, and talked to PCWorld about data portability and SIOC. Uldis recorded a podcast with Talis in February with SIOC as one of the main topics. (Eric Miller also described in another Talis podcast how FOAF and SIOC are useful not only for getting at historical content, but for providing fine-tuned content-delivery systems connecting people interested in various aspects of a particular domain.)
• Alex has produced a universal SIOC reader widget. The widget can query for SIOC data from any SPARQL endpoint that provides a JSON output for SELECT queries. (Alex has also released the Meaning of a Tag ontology which links with SIOC and SCOT.)
• Phillip Rhodes has been working on the OpenQabal “social software operating system” which integrates a set of applications (including Roller and JavaBB ) via single sign-on (SSO), a common look-and-feel, and SIOC.
• Sean Palmer has written an interesting article entitled “One Semantic Application, One UI?” in which he talks about Tabulator and its interfaces, including application specific panes for FOAF, SIOC and DOAP.
• Tim Berners-Lee talked about FOAF and SIOC in an interview with Marie Boran from Silicon Republic for the Irish Independent: “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. Groups are a very important part of the Web because online communities are where we form our trust. It is very useful to build tools that apply to all the online communities so they can all generate this social trust information. I am excited about SIOC because you can use that information to determine trust, to let people in. If someone is in a group that a friend of mine is part of, I can create another relationship based on that.”
• Uldis, Tuukka Hastrup and Thomas Schandl are updating Uldis’ WordPress SIOC Importer, which allows you to create blog posts based on SIOC data ported from weblogs, mailing lists, forums, IRC, etc.
• Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak and Tom Heath have published a very useful document called “How to Publish Linked Data on the Web” (mentions vocabularies to use like FOAF, DC, SIOC, DOAP, SKOS, MO, Rev and CC). See also Leo Sauermann and Richard’s “Cool URIs for the Semantic Web“.
• In the area of collaborative work environments, SIOC is being used in the Ecospace project to export metadata from both BSCW and BC. Here is a BSCW SIOC export service, and there is also a CWE version of the SIOC Explorer (which includes data from both BSCW and BC).
• Sören Auer‘s team have produced Triplify, which enables simple mapping of RDB to RDF data in a variety of web applications. Using Triplify, SIOC and FOAF data can be produced from Drupal 5, WordPress, WackoWiki, and Open Journal Systems.
• The new version of BoardTracker will have an API to export data using SIOC.
• The Sindice group will soon release the SWPop widget for WordPress that allows you to view posts, comments, topics, etc. made by any blog commenter across the SIOC-o-sphere (as indexed by Sindice). You can see a preview here.
• This is an interesting post by Andrew A. Peterson on how semantic standards like RSS, FOAF and SIOC (SIOD!) can provide sustainable SEO for websites, referencing the Yahoo! Search announcement regarding support for RDF and microformats.
• Ben O’Steen describes a Pylons interface to carry out CRUD functionality where items are linked together semantically using SIOC.
• Leigh Dodds has a fun FOAF (and SIOC) tale about Bee Node (told using SPARQL)!
• I’ve presented at WebCamp on DataPortability, web standards, SIOC and FOAF and recorded a related video on DataPortability and me. It pales in comparison to this one from Danny Ayers!

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

Kingsley remixes my DataPortability slides as "Data Accessibility and Me: Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Linked Data Web"

Kingsley Idehen told me on IRC that he remixed my presentation on DataPortability and SIOC from yesterday as Data Accessibility and Me: Introducing SIOC, FOAF and the Linked Data Web.

I’ve never had my slides remixed before, I’m honoured! Here’s the new version:

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Danja rocks with his "DataPortability and me" video / some slides I've made for DP+SIOC

Wow! Danny Ayers has made the best video I’ve seen for the “DataPortability and me” competition, which ends today:

Travelling on the train to Dublin and back this morning, I gathered and made some slides for future presentations on DataPortability and SIOC:

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(De-)centralised me

TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington has an interesting article today about the “centralised me”, a follow-up to Loic Le Meur‘s post about wanting to re-centralise his decentralised social “map”. Here is a picture I drew some time back showing the decentralised me:

I previously talked about how SIOC and FOAF can be used to represent this, and how this representation of people’s decentralised content is tied to the networks formed via social objects. (See also this paper.)

This is certainly something that fits with the ideas of DataPortability. I think people may have different requirements, including:

• I may want to centralise my stuff on my own service, like Loic outlined.
• I may want to see my stuff on a third-party service providing an aggregate view, like FriendFeed.
• I may want to move all my stuff from multiple services to one third-party service.
• I may just 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 Blog Service).

DataPortability, Microsoft's Contacts API and OpenSocial.org

(No, the picture I created on the right ISN’T the new DataPortability logo; I totally missed out on the closing date, but it will serve as an image for this blog post. There have been some very cool submissions for the competition however.)

There were two interesting announcements yesterday in the portability space. The first was from Microsoft, announcing that they would be “working with Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn to exchange functionally-similar Contacts APIs, allowing us to create a safe, secure two-way street for users to move their relationships between our respective services” (Contacts APIs provide contact data portability). The second was from Google, Yahoo! and MySpace, jointly announcing that an OpenSocial Foundation is to be formed as a non-profit entity (OpenSocial provides social application portability). Unfortunately, there is still some confusion regarding exactly what data portability functionality OpenSocial will offer (if any), and at the moment the consensus seems to be that DataPortability and OpenSocial aren’t as related as previously thought.

DataPortability (including Microsoft’s move in this area) is mainly about users being able to have portable data (profiles, identities, content like photos, videos, discussion posts) that they can move between the services and sites that they trust and choose to use. (See Uno de Waal’s interesting post on how the Microsoft Invite2Messenger service allows you to get your Facebook friends’ e-mail addresses in plain text.)

OpenSocial on the other hand is more about “gadget” portability, where social applications can be deployed across a variety of social networking sites. As summarised by Julian Bond, OpenSocial consists of a gadget API (for gadget programmers) and a standard for site owners to implement these gadgets on their own sites. The part of OpenSocial related to DataPortability is a REST API, details of which are a bit vague right now. Not to be confused with OpenSocial (although the similar names make this difficult), the Social Graph API from Google is more related to DataPortability as it indexes semantic data from many social networking sites like Hi5, MySpace, LiveJournal, Twitter, etc. and allows users to bring their social graph with them when they sign up for a new site that supports the API.

Apart from the lack of intersection between Microsoft (plus affiliate Facebook) and Google, a good few companies are in multiple “camps” (DataPortability, Contacts APIs, OpenSocial), as shown by the Venn diagram I drew below:

Marc Canter and others have pointed out that although the Contact APIs from Microsoft are not open in themselves, at least the APIs seem to export as much data as they can import. Marc also says that Microsoft (and other big companies) may not be explicitly following the actions (e.g. the technical recommendations) of the DataPortability initiative, but rather claims that it would hurt them if they didn’t open up and go along with some portable data efforts given the current climate and the tide of users in favour of this.

For users to have true data portability, there needs to be some consensus on both the APIs and the formats needed to transfer / represent this portable data. It may be that a number of APIs and formats are required for different scenarios. The Semantic Web is an ideal means for representing the data to be ported from social websites, in that is well suited (using vocabularies like SIOC and FOAF) to represent how people and all kinds of objects on these sites are connected together (documents, discussions, meetups, places, interests, media files – whatever). Of course other data formats may be used, but most importantly, it would be a waste of time to come up with a bunch of new formats for representing the data that needs to be portable, because a lot of work has been done on how to best provide interoperable, reusable and linked data through efforts like the Semantic Web, AtomPub and the microformats community.

I’ll be attending the DataPortability Lunch Meetup in London on the 6th April 2008 if anyone there feels like a chat about some of these topics…

Related posts:

• DataPortability and me, JB
• Interviewed for Data Portability article on PCWorld.com / WashingtonPost.com; SIOC mentioned
• DataPortability.org, web standards, SIOC and FOAF

DataPortability and me, JB

As part of the DataPortability initiative, I’ve put together this video explaining why I think it’s important and how it fits in with the Semantic Web and SIOC:

(Edit: An audio recording of this morning’s steering group telecon is now available.)

Semantic Web for Dummies

I referenced this on the SIOC-Dev mailing list recently, and when I pasted it on the DataPortability.org steering group chat this morning (in parallel with our first phone conference), Drummond Reed suggested I blog it. It’s originally from MIT’s Stefan Marti:

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!

(Picture by Duncan Hull.)

DataPortability.org, web standards, SIOC and FOAF

Leo Sauermann has written an e-mail to the public DataPortability.org mailing list suggesting that the DataPortability.org initiative also takes W3C’s web standards like RDF into account, as well as considering existing efforts like FOAF and SIOC for data portability on the social web. The initiative’s chairperson Chris Saad has indicated that they will put all related communities and standards in context, including RDF (and I assume FOAF and SIOC too).

As co-founder of the SIOC project, I’ve recently been evangelising the fact that SIOC can be used to provide a representation of all content items created by a person (via their user accounts) on various social media sites, and this can be nicely combined with the FOAF profile of that person who holds the associated user accounts (click on the picture below, and see our Internet Computing article for more).

In the image, Bob holds user accounts on various social websites (two shown for clarity, but here’s another view), and via those accounts he creates content items (usually within containers of some sort, e.g., in a bookmark folder, personal weblog, message board or image gallery) on those sites. He should be able to port not only his social graph (in this case, his connections to Alice and Carol), but also his personal containers / sets of content items and perhaps even associated comment replies. The vocabulary terms are shown in dark grey: foaf:knows, sioc:User, etc.

It’d be great if we can get some of the DataPortability.org people to come to the WebCamp workshop on Social Network Portability in Cork in March. There are some valuable contributors to the initiative so far including Chris Saad, Ashley Angell, Paul Jones, Chris Messina, Ben Metcalfe, Daniela Barbosa, Phill Morle, Ian Forrester, Shashank Tripathi, Kristopher Tate, Paul Keen, Brian Suda, Emily Chang, Danny Ayers, Marc Canter, Jeremy Keith, Peter Saint-Andre, Robyn Tippins, and Robert Scoble.