Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (June 2012)
Summary
This month we witnessed some of the potential challenges with making the web more secure, with some of the most popular sites reporting password breaches. Perhaps this strengthens the advantages of secure single sign-on and PKI.
Congratulations after several years of hard work, goes to three technologies reaching W3C REC status. The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published RDFa Core 1.1, RDFa Lite 1.1, and XHTML+RDFa 1.1 as W3C Recommendations.
Q2 of 2012 sees the Read Write Web with a few maturing social platforms, and some focus starting to shift to the challenges associated with building an application framework. We are also happy to announce that we’ve been in discussions to help incubate three important specs: RDF Interfaces, RDF API, RDFa API (more on this below).
Communications and Outreach
It has been provisionally agreed (pending some final approval) that the RWW community group will take over the mantle of working on the programmable interfaces defined by the RDF Web Application WG, the specifications (RDF Interfaces, RDF API, RDFa API) will be published as notes by that group in the near future, and the editor(s) of the specifications as well as implementors have agreed that the RWW group is the most natural home for the specifications.
We look forward to continuing on the work, and tying it in with the rest of the Read Write Web. The work will be lead by Nathan Rixham, and if you’re interested in working on these specifications, implementing them, or building libraries and tooling on top of the specifications then please do join in.
Community Group
The Community Group would like to welcome to new joiners which now takes our numbers past the half century mark. In particular we look forward to working with those coming over from other Working Groups.
Some great discussions on the scope of the group has yielded a list of topics added to the wiki (thanks bergi!). Please do take a chance to browse the various protocols and systems people are working on, and put your name down if there’s anything that particularly interests you. There’s also been some posts about how apps can delegate auth in order to work with social networks. I suspect the whole application platform is something we’ll iron out over the next quarter.
Applications
Lots of new features are starting to appear in the social nets such as “My Profile“. Federated messaging with email notifications, protected friend only news feeds, intelligent searching through to friends of friends, are just some of the great new features.
Some awesome work has taken place in terms of bootstrapping cloud storage to Access Controlled Read Write Web Spaces (GDrive, Dropbox, Skydrive, Box.net). And also it’s now possible to use your own WebID protected versions of mediawiki. Kudos to Kingsley’s team at OpenLink for making this happen.
Last but not least…
Some buzz in linked data land about the possibility of using linked data games to help improve the ecosystem aka GWAP — “Games With A Purpose”. Mixed opinions on this one, but feel free to give VeriLinks or WhoKnows Movies …. a try and see if you can beat the top score 🙂
