Kind of a lightning talk on how semweb folk might try to keep track of a bewildering collection of 'social web' standards efforts...

1. Acronym Soup
A bluffer’s guide to Social Web standards
Dan Brickley
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

2. • the nice thing about standards
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

3. ActivityStreams
Microformats DAP
hCard FOAF
Atom
OpenSocial XFN
OAuth
Text OAuth-WRAP
GRDDL XMPP/Jabber
Open Microblogging
RSS1
RDFa
FOAF+SSL Social Graph API
Salmon Atom Publishing Protocol
pubsubhubbub JSON W3C Widgets
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

4. Other nice things
• Extraordinary potential for impact
• Interesting people and problems
• ‘Interesting’ timescales (CSS ’96, RDF ’97...)
• Figuring out how it all fits together
• So how do SocialWeb specs fit SemWeb?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

5. Semantic Web &
Modesty
• Immodest goal: describe everything
• Modest approach: share that work
• Describing stuff is our core business
• others do authentication, UI, APIs, ...
• how to keep track of ‘those others’?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

6. Memory tricks
• Who made it? people / companies / org
• “Like x but made by y” (OpenSocial)
• For situations like y (eg. “trusted access to
private photos for t-shirt printing site”)
• “the Password Anti-Pattern”
• Another name for x (XMPP = Jabber)
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

7. Composition and
analogy
• XMPP uses XML for Instant Messaging
• OpenSocial uses OAuth for trusted access
• FOAF+SSL uses SSL for authentication
• OAuth-WRAP is like OAuth but using SSL
• Microdata is like RDFa made by
microformatters
• XMPP as middleware: SOAP meets IRC
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

8. Quick example
• Open MicroBlogging (OMB) is a draft spec
to federate Twitter-like services
• It uses OAuth
• StatusNet (opensource software, company)
• StatusNet previously ‘laconi.ca’
• Flagship site: identi.ca (lots of FOAF too)
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

9. Find reasons to care
• With OAuth, I can authenticate Twitter
uses and access their stuff & act as them
• With OpenID, millions of users can login
by proving they control URLs
• what are the business and UI reasons
they aren’t doing this more?
• Link to trust/provenance on SemWeb?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

10. Tuesday, March 9, 2010

11. • With W3C Widgets, I can write apps in
HTML/.js that run on mobile handsets
• (..ooO “like iPhone but standardised?”)
• and with W3C DAP APIs, I can request
access geo, addressbook and calendar
descriptions of their life
• With OpenSocial I can run similar code as
a Hyves or LinkedIn add-on, with trusted
access to Portable Contacts addressbook
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

12. Trustyness
• with the Google Social Graph API, I can ask
who uses XFN or FOAF to say “http://
www.youtube.com/user/danbri is me”
• and check if the claim is reciprocated
• at Web scale, parsing RDF/XML with
Redland Raptor toolkit
• (RDFa might be harder - but why?
• ..oOO(so if x was an openid, and x=y...?)
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

13. Data flow
• with the Atom Publishing Protocol, I can
publish content on thousands of blogging
sites
• if I have a user’s username and password
• what if I could negotiate an OAuth
token instead?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

14. Tips
• Make time to experiment and hack
• And participate in blogs, mailing lists
• You absorb info quicker when you know
the people, attitudes, culture of a project
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

15. Tuesday, March 9, 2010