Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (May 2013)
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!
Re Gmail/JSON-LD, “Response has been generally positive to this move, with perhaps the possibility for couple of minor tweaks to the markup.”
We’ve made the main tweak: added ‘http://’ to examples (a variant that was already parsed ok). Markup generator will be updated soon too. The only other issue was publishing a context file at schema.org; details are being discussed.
Hi,
i ve been working on Social Network design for entreprises, and coming to the standardisation facet, i was wondering what it is about Activity streams. Could you please help me by providing relevant information around this standard : the aim, the results, where is it worked (W3C, IETF, ?)
best regards
fbe
Thanks for the question. Some backgroud on activity streams can be found at: http://activitystrea.ms/
IMHO, one of the main attractions of AS is that it has quite good adoption.
The aligning with JSON Linked Data (in this latest version 2.0) may enable it to benefit from two quite large eco systems, and help standardize the interchange of social data on the web.