Read Write Web — Q1 Summary — 2014
Summary
This month The Web celebrated its 25th birthday. Celebrating on web25 Tim Berners-Lee poses 3 important questions. 1. How do we connect the nearly two-thirds of the planet who can’t yet access the Web? 2. Who has the right to collect and use our personal data, for what purpose and under what rules? 3. How do we create a high-performance open architecture that will run on any device, rather than fall back into proprietary alternatives? Join the discussion at the web we want campaign and perhaps we can help make the web more interactive and more read/write.
Two important technologies became W3C RECs this month, the long awaited JSON LD and RDF 1.1. Well done to everyone involved on reaching these milestones.
This community group reaches 2.5 years old. Congrats to our co-chair Andrei Sambra who has moved over to work with Tim, Joe and team at MIT. Some work on identity, applications and libraries has moved forward this quarter, more below!
Communications and Outreach
In Paris this month there was a well attended workshop on Web Payments. The group hopes to take a set of specs to REC status including some on identity credentials and access controlled, reading and writing, of user profiles.
Andrei had a productive talk with Frank Karlitschek the creator of the popular personal data store, OwnCloud. Hopefully, it is possible to mutually benefit by reusing some of the ideas created in this group.
Community Group
There’s been some updated software for our W3C CG blogging platform, so anyone that wishes to make a post related to read and write web standards ping Andrei or myself, or just dive in!
There’s been some useful contributions to rdflib.js and a new library which proposes the ‘pointed graph’ idea. I’ve also taken feedback on the User Header discussions we have had and put them in a wiki page. Additionally, the WebID specs now have a permanent home.
There have also been discussions on deeplinking / bookmarkability for single page apps. I’ve also been working on an ontology for crypto currencies which I am hoping to integrate into the RWW via a tipping robot next quarter.
Applications
Great work from the guys over at MIT with a new decentralized blogging platform, Cimba. Cimba is also a 100% client side app, it can run on a host, on github, or even on your local file system. Feel free to sign up and start some channels, or just take a look at the screencast.
In addition to Cimba, Webizen has been launched to help you search for connections more easily. Search for friends on the decentralized social web, or add your own public URI.
Last but not least…
For those of you that enjoy SPARQL, Linked Data Fragments, presents new ways to query linked data via a web client. This tool is designed to provide a ‘fragment’ of a whole data set with high reliability, so happy SPARQLing!
