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Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (May 2013)

Melvin Carvalho

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Summary

WWW 2013 took place this year, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  There was a packed program, including an interesting workshop entitled “Linked Data on the Web“, four papers of which, were dedicated to the Read Write Web.

The big news in linked data is that gmail has started to add JSON LD to their popular email service.  This allows developers to embed structured data into an email, in the form of Reviews, RSVPs, Interactive actions and Flight cards.  Response has been generally positive to this move, with perhaps the possibility for couple of minor tweaks to the markup.

The following papers were presented at the Read Write Web session in Rio : R&Wbase: git for triples, OSLC Resource Shape: A language for defining constraints on Linked Data, Hydra: A Vocabulary for Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs, Reasoning over SPARQL.  The website w3id.org was also released, which promises to be a permanent home for COOL URIs.

 

Communications and Outreach

The RWW group welcomes new members.  In particular, we had a great introduction from read write web veteran, Henri Bergius.  Henri has been working on read write topics for a number of years.  Notably midgaurd in the 1990s, and more recently, the impressive create.js.  If you’re unfamiliar with Henri’s work you may enjoy this video that goes through many core concepts.

 

Community Group

There has been some discussion on the mailing list, but also with the semantic web group, and some IETF folks as to the best way to use HTTP to identify a user to a server.  This would enable a user to identify itself to a server without having to rely on the subjecctAltName field in a client side TLS certificate, or other methods.  Thought had been to reuse the “From” header, however this seems tightly bound to email.  Current thinking is that we draft text for a new header, then find a name for it.

 

Applications

Our co-chair, Andrei Sambra, met the developers of the Cozy Cloud project in Paris.  There’s hope that this system can be combined with the my-profile project to become a kind of read write web example of a social dashboard.  Cozy Cloud comes with a dozen or so cloud enabled apps, and has also been short listed for the LeWeb London best startup competition, so wishing them best of luck!

 

Last but not least…

Activity Streams, the popular social network data exchange format, have been dipping their toes into Linked data with, Activity Streams 2.0, a JSON LD powered activity stream.  This currently does not have official standing but the reception has been good, and there is talk of pushing it through the IETF.  Hopefully this can finally lead to a united and interoperable social web for all!

Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (April 2013)

Melvin Carvalho

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Summary

It was exactly ten years ago, that Richard MacManus wrote his seminal article entitled, ‘The Read/Write Web‘.   In a time when ‘weblogs’ were a new phenomenon, and Facebook and Twitter were but twinkles in their founder’s eyes, it’s very much worth reflecting on just how far the RWW has come in the last decade!

A new acronym, WYSIWYM, was coined with the announcement of the impressive markup tool, RDFaCE.  Watch the screencast to see ‘What You See Is What You Mean’, in action.

The big announcement of the month came from Manu Sporny who demonstrates the new Payswarm Linked Data Payments Protocol in action.  The whole suite includes many important solutions, such as identity, digital signing, key management, encryption and, of course, payments!

Communications and Outreach

There is been more interaction with the W3C payments group on the newly implemented payments protocol.  There was some discussion about using WebID as a decentralized identity system.  Essentially payswarm are already using HTTP URIs to denote an agent so there seems to be a close similarity.  Now we can tie these to PEM keys and allow signatures and encryption.  That is going to give many new options for identity, auth, secure payments and messaging.

There has also been some initial discussion with OASIS about using Access Control Lists with linked data.

Community Group

There has been some talk about extending the “from” header to allow anyURI as wells as the currently suggested email.  This has come up a few times in the past and could be a neat way to identify a user.  There is a firefox plugin which some people are using already.

A new protocol, Webmention, which is in its early stages, and allows federated commenting on blogs has had some buzz on the web.  It is also very similar to the semantic pingback protocol many systems use already.

Applications

The first commercial integration of linked data payment systems was launched in the form or ‘meritora‘.  The team behind it, digital bazaar, have also been driving forces in the payswarm, rdfa, json ld and webid efforts.  Great to see so many web scale technologies come together in a new system!

There was a look at Daniel Applequist’s integration to the internet of things and cosm to write his room temperature to the web in realtime.

Last but not least…

The German Wikimedia Foundation has announced that its Wikidata project has now been deployed on all language versions of Wikipedia and is ready for use around the world.  Wikidata – the first new Wikimedia project since 2006 – “provides a collaboratively edited database of the world’s knowledge”.  Congrats on this big milestone and reaching their 12 millionth linked data item!

Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (March 2013)

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

Summary

Some excitement on the web as the new version of HTTP (named HTTPbis) gets closer to being launched.  Kingsley has pointed out some important details related to URLs and the Content-Location header.

Linked data continues it’s steady progress with many of the world’s libraries publishing their data using the VIAF endpoint.

SPARQL 1.1 has been voted an official W3C REC, meaning we now have, a long awaited,  read write query language for the web.

Communications and Outreach

There has been good progress with with the WebID community group, in fixing some bugs in the cert ontology.  Also adding DSA keys, and discussion of further work.  I also informally talked to the bitcoin foundation, about creating a bitcoin ontology.  It’s a hope of mine that the read write web can be soon used for payments, and we seem to be getting very close now.

Community Group

A relatively quite March in the CG, we did however welcome SPARQL 1.1 as a REC, giving read and write querying ability on the web.  There has been some previous discussion about adding sparql to the “well known” pattern on websites, which is perhaps something that can be further incubated.

Some early feelers have been put out too, to see if anyone will be able to attend TPAC 2013 in China.

Applications

Some preliminary informal work has taken place to try and model crypto currencies for use in a read write ledger scenario.  Things that could be possibly modelled going forward are, payswarm (already linked data compliant), bitcoin, litecoin and ripple.

I’ve spoken to people at the bitcoin foundation about creating an ontology which could hopefully be an interesting use case for the read write web, working with interesting distributed computing problems such as, network synchronization, race conditions, the Byzantine generals’ problem, double-spending and reputation based trust.  Little in the way of prototypes at this second, but definitely more to come in this space!

Last but not least…

Google embrace the realtime read write web with their announcement of Google Drive Realtime API.  There have already been some previous RWW experiments with the Google Drive system, so it will be interesting to see what apps can be built on top of this!

Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (February 2013)

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

Summary

Realtime communications were in play this month, with some impressive demos of firefox and chrome talking to each other, using the W3C WebRTC protocol.  For those wishing to try it out, some of this functionality has been abstracted in a developer friendly API, called PeerJS.  On the social front, Google have also announced a sign-in process for their social application platform, Google+.

The Linked Data cloud, got that much bigger, as statistics from the OECD, Swiss Federal Statistics Office and UN Food and Agriculture Organization joined the LOD cloud.  Kudos to Sarven Capadisli for making this happen, you can read the write up here.

Lots going on in the RWW, the highlight of which was probably the release of the Drupal WebID integration by Stéphane Corlosquet.  Account recovery and pairing were also fleshed out on the mailing list, this month, with some more demos.

Communications and Outreach

Over at the Web Application Store CG, three sets of manifests are in the process of being compared: W3C Widgets, the Chrome app store and Mozilla marketplace.  There has been talk of standardization which would be invaluable in delivering read write apps to the web.

Mozilla have announced a system of payments for their marketplace, and for firefox OS.  In the W3C Payments CG, there has been some discussion with Kumar McMillan, of Mozilla, on issues such as security and linked data integration. Their receipt protocol looks promising, and could perhaps be used in conjunction with the linked data apps to provide payments.

Community Group

This month in the community group there have been some great demos.  The first demonstrates conditional access to DropBox, SkyDrive, GoogleDrive, Box.net and Amazon S3.  Another shows multi protocol login to MediaWiki.

We have discussed two long standing problems and found some solutions.  One is account recovery and the other is pairing of devices.  Andrei has explained how both of these can be solved, with a full implementation in my-profile.

Applications

As previously mentioned, Stéphane Corlosquet, has announced his Drupal integration of WebID.  While Drupal 7 already has semantic elements, this can potentially help bring user centric linked data to a large portion of the Web.  There is a working demo here.

For those living on the bleeding edge, it’s now possible to experience realtime updates over turtle using tabulator, data.fm and curl.  Currently in production, the “updates via” branch of data.fm provides support for (secure) websockets.  This is best tested in the Chrome browser, navigate to, say, http://chat.data.fm/dig#test.  Then try to modify this file either by hand, from the UI or using curl ( curl -H “Content-Type: text/turtle” -X PUT -T dig http://chat.data.fm/ where ./dig is the turtle file) and watch the text update in realtime!

Last but not least…

For those following the FreedomBox project it has reached the first milestone of the software stack with version 0.1 being released.  FreedomBox aims to be a free software distributed system that allows you to keep all your logs and social data in the safety of your on home.  Congrats on reaching version 0.1, looking forward to future releases!

 

Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (January 2013)

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

Summary

The web was rocked this month with the tragic passing away of Aaron Swartz.  A mixture of tributes, anger and loss have been widely expressed.  Perhaps it was felt even more keenly by many in our group, as he was an active member of the linked data community.  Let’s hope that one day we are able to make the technologies that he dreamed of building, a reality.

The Worth Economic Forum this year witnessed a session with timbl entitled, ‘What is wrong with social networking‘.  I was particularly interested in Tim talking about a possible payments protocol at web scale.

A relatively quiet holiday period in the RWW still produced some interesting work.  There have been some updates to existing projects and some new ideas on the ‘realtime’ aspect of the Read Write Web.

Communications and Outreach

Continued discussions with the GNU Consensus group, including Richard Stallman, have lead to the possible idea of creating a User Data Manifesto.  A second draft of this concept is currently under way and could lay the foundations of some guidelines to help store data on the web in a way that offers users more control.

Community Group

Some great news in which, OpenLink announced they would donate their login widget to the community via open source.  Some of the members of the Community Group have been working with Sebastian Trueg of Openlink, to add this ‘polyglot’ login system to read write web applications.

The RWW also welcomes David Sheets, and Eric Bremner of Stony Brook University.

Applications

Some upgrades to existing applications.  My Profile  has undergone a redesign which has been very favourably received.  I put together a little realtime web chat demo with encryption as a proof of concept.

Some exciting news over at MIT with two new upgrades to data.fm.  One is to provide a control panel to make access control more user friendly.  The other is realtime SPARQL updates over web sockets.  I believe the proof of concept is already working in the tabulator project.  More news on this next month.

Last but not least…

X-Editable, A really nice ‘edit in place’ system that could be used in conjunction with the read write web, has recently become available.  It works with bootstrap, jquery or jquery UI so feel free to give it a try, maybe even tie it together with write standards!

Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (December 2012)

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

Summary

Wishing all read write web enthusiasts a happy new year!  2012 ended with heated debate, at the World Conference on International Telecommunications over ongoing governance of the internet.  Concerns had been raised that changes to the current groups, responsible for regulation, may have risk on the downside.  It would appear that the system that is in place, will continue at least in the short term.

Linked data has announced another interesting initiative, funded by the EU, in the area of the linked geo web.  The project is called “Geo Know“, and also has an associated Community group.

More work on RWW on distributed social identity and web apps, and some impressive demos.  Some discussions on ACLs and some great demos have left us in a position of achieving much of what we set out to do in 2012.  One personal thing that I’m happy about, is that I am now able to make web apps discoverable from my identity (homepage) using a new social web ontology.

Communications and Outreach

Some discussions on the social read write web has taken place with people from a number of project in the free software movement.  In particular, GNU Social have said they are open to implementing read write web standards work, provided that someone can do an integration.  A new system, GNU Consensus hopes to tie together many existing social net protocols.  And freedombox have talked about a unified web interface for tying together your social systems.  Look forward to seeing development in that area next year.

Community Group

A relatively quiet holiday period still produced some interesting topics.  We now have an informal google plus community.    Just ping the group is you’d like an invite.  It’s open to people outside of the CG too.

One of my goals for 2012 has finally come to pass, in that I can now link “web apps” from my profile.  This allows apps that are designed for the web discoverable from your own profile using the “webapp” predicate.  An example can be seen here.

 

Applications

Fantastic work from Openlink in creating an open source widget that allows users to login via account from WebID, Persona, OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Windows Live, WordPress, Yahoo, Tumblr, Disqus, Instragram, Bitly, Foursquare, Dropbox and Github!  This widget can be used to deliver the read write web to a huge audience of existing accounts.

 

Last but not least…

An enlightening review of technologies that have sprung up this year, entitled “The Most Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012″.  The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed!

Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (November 2012)

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

Summary

ISWC 2012 took place in Boston this year, with many from this group participating in, what I hear was a very productive conference.  Many topics were discussed including refining the definition of Identity on the Web, and the split between identity, authentication and authorization.

One of the products of this, and some following teleconferences is the first draft of the spec entitled Web Identity and Discovery.  This is a much shorter and focused spec than previous efforts decoupling identity on the web from authentication methods.

In light of the fact that this group has doubled in size in the last year, I’m delighted to announce that we have a second co-chair, Andrei Sambra, who has very kindly volunteered to help with the maintenance and continued development of the Community Group.

Communications and Outreach

This month we are happy to welcome Rob Mason, the chair of the augmented reality community group.  The Augmented Reality CG embraces the changes brought about by HTML5 and other related standards including Geolocation, DeviceOrientation, DeviceMotion, WebGL, Web Audio, Media Capture & Streams and WebRTC.

There are some impressive demos already for viewing here.  Rob has posted a few threads about outreach in his group and is keen to see where the intersection of geo based augmented reality and the read write web can intersect.  I’ve already heard interest from one person in the group that is thinking of building a privacy-aware application to allow check-ins to various locations, and allow you to share that with your friends.

Community Group

The Community Group is happy to announce that we will now have two co-chairs, to help manage the administrative tasks of the group and help out in general.  As we have doubled in size in the last year, this will hopefully help us to achieve more as a group, and allows for future growth.  Andrei is responsible for the my-profile.eu project, and is currently working with Tim Berners-Lee’s group at MIT.

This month was our most active to date, in terms of discussion.  There have been a number of threads and also teleconferences to discuss, among other things, hot topics such as Web Identity, Discovery and Access Control.

Applications

There was some discussion on how to add applications to existing identity providers.  There’s been some suggestions, however it may be a good if it were possible to add an application to a page or profile using a single “rel” link.  I’m hoping we can get at least one implementation in the next month.

One interesting app I came across is a mockup screen designer.  It writes your data to localStorage currently, but it might be quite neat to use this with write standards to save your designs to the cloud.

Last but not least…

Google have announced static site hosting via Google Drive.  This can potentially allow read and write operations to the web and publishing aspects to a large user base, with an easy, intuitive and non disruptive user experience.

Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (October 2012)

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

Summary

Lyon, France witnessed around 500 of the top minds on the web, gathering for, TPAC 2012.  There were many great workshops and events as well as unconference style ‘breakout sessions‘.  It was also the first opportunity for the RWW CG to have a face to face meeting, which I think everyone in attendance, thoroughly enjoyed.

We were also able to have some great interactions with the Linked Data Profile Working Group, who suggest that RWW using their upcoming REC track standards for building apps, would be a good fit.  A milestone was reached with the publication of Linked Data Platform 1.0 Draft.

Some excellent RWW sessions, together with WebID and Federated Social Web sessions were chaired by, among others, Henry Story.  Timbl generously gave us the best part of his time for the first two days, as we tried to hammer out some conceptual aspects of identity on the web and a plan to move forward for the short to medium term.  There was much interest in the workshops and breakout sessions, which were mostly standing room only.  Henry has sent a number of excellent reports to the mailing list covering the work done at TPAC.

Communications and Outreach

TPAC took centre stage as dozens of new connections were made, as well as, existing ones strengthened.  IBM and Boeing showed interest during our workshops, as well as cloudiway, the dutch fire department and many more.  Good work has already taken place between RWW members and the linked data profile team, which is hopefully a good sign of things to come.

There was some great dialogue with identity people at microsoft, chatting to microformats and some very impressive work by Mozilla.  In general it was an energizing event, and I would cautiously suggest there has been an uptick in interest, from a wide range of participants.

Community Group

Lots of work happened this month prior to TPAC, in particular two proposals caught the eye.  The first of which, rww-0 interop, describes a baseline set of tests that will provide a scalable identity, authentication and authorization structure for the read write web.  The second was a set of use cases that could be used to model a rich social networking system such as facebook.

One positive to come out of TPAC is an appreciation of a clean modular architecture to emphasize a separation of concerns between, identification, authentication and authorization.

The RWW enjoyed its first F2F meeting, which I think exceeded all expectations.  Perhaps the only criticism might be that we didnt have enough time to spend together, as many were only able to attend for short periods.  Still much work got done, with many presentations and demos.  We were able to demonstrate data.fm compliance to access control, provision everyone in the room with an identity, and show interop of various systems.

Applications

An interesting new web scale distributed social system under development, lifeshare, was demoed at TPAC.  Currently it is in the French language, but there is ongoing work to improve it.  One to watch!

There were also nice demos from cloudiway who plan to roll out their system to 15,000 students by end of year.  My-profile.eu, which we’ve covered before, was demoed in a number of areas, and is now available as a virtual machine.  Good luck to Andrei who is heading off to work with the team at MIT/DIG.   That said, the above is only a small snapshot of all the presentations and demos that took place, there were many more people than I can name, that made awesome contributions.

Last but not least…

Ubuntu have announced an integration of WebApps on the desktop.  The integration is a conservative first step but seems to be pretty well done so far.  With Ubuntu predicted to ship on 5% of PCs worldwide next year, this could be the start of an interesting marriage between the web and the desktop!

WebID, ReadWriteWeb and SocialWeb meetup at TPAC

Henry Story

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The Apache Software Foundation

TPAC logo
The Technical Plenary is the place where W3C working groups come to meet. This year it will take place in Lyon, France, from 29 October to 2 November, at only 2 hours from Paris by TGV.

In particular the members of the WebID, Read Write Web, and Federated Social Web Community groups will be able to use the occasion to meet (a first for Community Groups at TPAC!). This will be a great occasion test out software for interoperability, discuss standards, as well as meet other W3C members. It will take place on Monday October 29 and Tuesday October 30th. On Wednesday during the Plenary there may even be an occasion for other W3C members to get to learn more about what the WebID and Read Write Web Communities have been working on.

Please consult and prarticipate in setting the agenda on the RWW wiki.

Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (September 2012)

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

Summary

As Q3 of 2012 draws to an end, many have noticed the launch of version 0.1 of, tent.io.  Inspired by the WWW and Xanadu, tent aims to be distributed protocol using HTTP URIs to identify users, and communication via HTTP and JSON.  With over 2500 signups on the first day, it shows some promise as a new breed of social net driven by HTTP.  Hopefully it will, long term, be compatible with Linked Data!

Two interesting read-write linked data tehcnologies move forward, with the first “editors draft” of Linked Data Basic Profile (LDBP) which interestingly mandates using turtle, and an update to JSON PATCH.

The RWW has got space at TPAC from Mon 29 Oct through Wed 31 Oct, thanks to Henry Story and others.  There have been further discussions on trust, universal access control, and some interesting conversations over at the WebID CG with Ben Laurie of Google, on deployment, usability and privacy.

Communications and Outreach

It’s been tentatively agreed to merge the RWW CG with the “Uncertainty and Trust in the Semantic Web” CG.  This is mainly due to the fact that “untsw” has fallen inactive, and the majority of members, are already in RWW.  Many thanks to Coralie for helping facilitate this, the plan is to discontinue untsw by end of October.

There’s been some discussions with the Web Application Store CG about unifying meta data that can be associated with apps.  With so many app stores out there, growing fast, the application store bootstrap will hopefully be a great chance to give users of the web, many more features.

Community Group

The RWW has a room at TPAC, for Mon 29 – Wed 31 October, thanks to Henry Story and others.  Please dont forget that early bird registration ends October 16th.  Please put your name down on the wiki if you intend on coming.

Aside from the merger with untsw there’s been a few interesting discussions on trust, both in the RWW and on the payments list.  I’ve made some notes in our wiki.  One idea that I particularly liked from payments is that it is possible to indicate your trust for someone by offering them a credit line.  Perhaps an exciting way to get the web economy going.

Applications

The theme of dogfooding has come up again and members of this group have been encouraged (lead by Kingsley!) to sign their emails using S/MIME.

The reason for this is to bootstrap email to the web using the “follow your nose” pattern.  You receive an email, then click on the signature, and it takes you to a Web Identity.  From there you are into the social graph, can friend the person, view the wall etc.

The advantage of this approach is that it can be performed by both humans and machines using well established web standards, hopefully helping to unite the world of email and the web in a social and machine readable way.

Last but not least…

It’s been around for a while, but for some reason may not have got the attention it deserves, viejs, the Semantic Interaction Framework, is a great companion to the javascript RWW.   Some great demos, an auto complete bar, and plugins to make CMS content editable are just a few of the great feature in this package.  If you have any feedback feel free to post to our mailing list where the maintainer, Henri Bergius, has kindly offered to answer questions.