Lesley Anderson

Data portability, FOAF and the Semantic Web

1.  Begin with the YouTube video at http://www.foaf-project.org/community

I found this video an interesting and novel way to get an IT based message across to an audience.  It does it though - reminding  the viewer  that for each social networking site you sign up to, you have to fill in the same data or information about yourself over and over again and how much easier life would be if you could just “get your date out” once.  One size to fit all, saving time and energy and letting you get on with the social side of social networking.

2. Like a chain letter, our data seems to move within and between
tools like Facebook and Twitter. Is this a good thing?

People’s web presence forms part of their identity so they should have the right to move their information wherever, whenever they wish.  It is understandable that a business - once you sign up with it - is going to do everything in its power to keep you tied to them. They may use the term ’service’ but ultimately they are businesses and like all other businesses need to make a profit to stay in business.  The number of people they have within their network has to be the clincher for the advertising attached to sites that ultimately makes them money.

Giving users flexibility to move, if they want to, from one network to another and take their data with them, could possibly be what spurs network creators to do better things with their sites and software - so that people won’t want to leave. In that way there are benefits to all parties. Sites keep their numbers and users keep their data and options to use it wherever they like.

I have to admit, I am over filling in the same information repetitively in order to access sites that offer social networking software and facilities but that is more to do with laziness than retention of my own identity or data.

3.  How does the FOAF tag from part of the Semantic Web and Web services via social networks?

The Semantic Web is the vision of World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee’s for a ’smarter’ Web and was first laid out in the late 1990s. It involves adding metadata to each piece of data on the Web to convey its meaning (semantics). In theory, this added context would help Web-based software applications use the data more appropriately.

The technology to undertake such a huge effort - to tag all that data with metadata - does not exist as yet, partly because of the size of the task and partly because of lack of agreement on the format for the metadata but FOAF is one of the projects moving toward the goal. Friend of a Friend files offer brief personal descriptions written in a standard computer language called the Resource Description Framework (RDF); they contain information such as a person’s name, nicknames, e-mail address, homepage URL, and photo links, as well as the names of the people that person knows.

Generating a FOAF file and uploading it to a site, theoretically allows others using FOAF - enabled search software such as FOAF Explorer to be able to find a user more easily. Eventually, more may be possible- for example, instantly creating a network of friends on a new social-networking service simply by importing an FOAF file. FOAF is an example of how the Semantic Web attempts to make use of the relationships within a social context.