Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (May 2012)
Summary
Linked data continues its mainstream roll out, with the annoucment of the Google Knowledge Graph, becoming part of standard search results. The “Linked Data Platform” WG has been chartered, and will hopefully provide a solid framework for RWW systems. Congrats also, to two important technologies, RDFa and JSON-LD which have announced they have moved to a final track towards REC status.
On the Read Write Web the focus has been on more interop between social platforms, and improvements to the pingback protocol. More testing and importantly bridges from Web / WebID based systems towards email, complete a final bootstrap, that has been requested for a long time.
Communications and Outreach
The Read Write Web CG is happy to announce a collaboration with the W3C unhosted Community Group. Unhosted is a group of 50+ enthusiasts with a broad goal of “personal data freedom” and are aiming to create apps and protocols to allow users to store data online.
The draft protocols will be brainstormed in our wiki section currently available for review here. Initial versions aim to support “simple” (HTTP verbs PUT/POST/DELETE/GET), “WebDAV”, “CouchDB” and hopefully SPARQL coming soon. The long term aim is to merge data access protocols to make them completely RWW compliant.
Community Group
Seven new joiners to the community group in May, takes our numbers to 49. Welcome to new participants, looking forward discussions, collaboration of projects and apps!
The wiki has undergone a minor revamp, with some improvements to the home page navigation. There is has been a major fleshing out of the Pingback protocol (thanks Bergi!). Flows now include authentication methods such as OAuth (trusted third party) which is going to be very interesting to try out. An archive of these blog reports is also available here.
Applications
Having achieved the first pingback last month, much more testing has taken place. Pingback is essentially a simple, secure and extensible messaging system between two URIs. Joining My Profile and Openlink Data Spaces, are tests including bergnet / resource me, aksw.org and a standalone form hosted on jsfiddle.
Importantly, pingbacks are now starting to bootstrap their way into email ( foaf mbox ) in order to bring more and more people from email, to the web. Lots of directions this can go, but I think areas to focus on next, will be on access control e.g. so that you can have “circles” and also allowing apps to be first class citizens in the notifications flow.
Last but not least…
Hypercard marks it’s 25th anniversary, it’s interesting to reflect, and see how far we’ve come, yet in some areas we’re just getting started. There’s a great article covering the history, perhaps with some insights to the future.
