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Update on “Smart Notebooks” project

Miles Fidelman

Posted on

Protocol Technologies Group, LLC

Thanks to all who’ve sent me comments!

The new, and hopefully improved Kickstarter page and video are now up at:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th

Take a look!  Comments welcome.  So are donations, likes, tweets, diggs, +1s, re-distribution, blog posts, and any other visibility!  And… if you happen to have a large, distributed project coming up – a conference, event, crowd sourcing effort, flash performance, disaster response exercise that just begs for a collaboration support tool – let’s talk!

Best,

Miles

new p2p kickstarter project

Miles Fidelman

Posted on

Protocol Technologies Group, LLC

Hi Folks,

I just launched a Kickstater project that might be of interest. The short form is "smart documents," running in browsers as webapps, that talk to each other via P2P protocols - as a tool for keeping virtual teams and projects "on the same page."  Model is browser-resident pages that communicate via a P2P protocol - so seems relevant to this group.

I encourage you to take a look at
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th
and if you're so moved, get on board. 

A bit more background:

For about 40 years my "thing" has always been the theory and practice of using the Internet to support virtual organizations.  I've scratched this itch by working on everything from C2 systems and distributed simulation, to electronic town meetings, online rulemakings, and webmarkets.

I've continued to find that the simplest tools seem to be the most effective - particularly email lists, and various forms of shared/synchronized documents, both on paper (musical scores, theatrical scripts) and electronic (RFCs, linked spreadsheets, military mission orders distributed by email).

This project represents a distillation of a lot of ideas about how to support virtual projects and teams with "smart documents."  It started out as some funded work on "smart op orders" that I'm trying to generalize as an open source tools.  I'm nominally calling them "smart notebooks" - and the core idea is "keeping people on the same page, across the net."

Think of a composer, writing some music, then handing out pages to orchestra members, then telling people to mark up their pages - then think about writing in a web browser, distributing by email, and linking the pages so markups propagate automatically.  Functionally, I've been thinking of the tool as a cross between a DayRunner on steroids, and HyperCard, retooled for groups, running in a browser.  No new tools to install, no fancy groupware running in the cloud - just web apps executing locally, email, and a P2P protocol.

If you can help spread the word - by reposting/retweeting/slashdotting/putting and so forth - that would really be helpful.  If you know anybody at Wired or Gizmodo, that would also be helpful (seems like coverage by one of those is a really good vehicle to successful Kickstarter funding).

If you have a project coming up that needs tools for supporting a distributed effort - say a large crowdsourcing project, or organizing a large event - I'm looking for scenarios to support - particuarly if you're funded 

And there's a 30-day clock running, so sooner is better!

Thank you very much for any support you might offer,

Miles Fidelman

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

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

Summary

Awesome scenes in July as one of our members opened the Olympic Games.  Incredible to see millions of people around the globe paying credit to way the Web has changed everyone’s lives.

Growing pains experienced in two important specs: HTML5 being forked into HTML5 / “HTML Living Standard” and the main editor of OAuth 2.0 resigning, shows the challenges involved with scaling out technologies to massive audience.

The RWW CG experienced it’s busiest month to date, with many interesting discussions (more on that below).  RWW is now probably one of the 3 busiest community group at the W3C, so a big thank you for everyone that has contributed to the conversations.

Communications and Outreach

We are very happy to announce joining forces with PeerPoint, which is a blueprint for a vision of the web as a peer to peer space based on sovereign computing:

“To be the true owner of your information and of your computer’s hardware resources, as well as to share these things in any way you want and only with whomever you want. To participate in the Internet free of the middleman, as an autonomous, independent and sovereign individual.”

We look forward to working on standards and apps to help achieve this vision.

Read more here!

Community Group

Henry story has kindly agreed to organize an unofficial Face to Face meeting at TPAC 2012 in Lyon, France.  Perhaps a great chance to get some people together from various community groups and a chance to do some hacking.

The mail list has experienced its biggest volume to date with around 200 messages.  Welcome to new joiners, please feel free to join in discussions, start topics, write blogs posts or contribute to our wiki.

Applications

Lots of pieces of the puzzle coming together this month with signed mail over WebID successfully achieved.  Also it’s been possible to access user walls from the command line using simple scripts that will repost, for example, tweets from other services to MyProfile.

Excellent work from OpenLink again, with SPARQL endpoints fully access controlled via WebID, demoed.  A fantastic dropbox integration allows 5 star linked data to be published with an incredibly low barrier to entry.  Perhaps worth pausing to consider the implications of this.

More discussions on delegation, as we are gearing up to link apps and social networks together in a way that is intuitive to users.  Perhaps we are at the point where we can create an app store for the Web, and maybe even link in payments via payswarm.

Last but not least…

Spotter’s badge goes to Brad Jones for finding yet another of michael hausenblas’ awesome projects, Turtled – a simple RDF Turtle visualisation tool (with SVG export) launched

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

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

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 :)

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

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

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.

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

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

Summary

A big month all round.  April saw over 2500 people attend the WWW conference, in Lyon.  An excellent wrap-up from Yves Raimond, is available here.  If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, the keynote is still available online.

“One of the main messages from the panel is that structured web data is already mainstream – Yahoo! reports that 25% of all web pages contain RDFa data and 7% contain Microdata. ”

 

Communications and Outreach

Our google page launch, was well received with 59 likes, so far.  Thanks to everyone that has helped or contributed.  Jürgen Jakobitsch has challenged us to reach 120 circles by the end of the year, so, keep spreading the word!

The Read Write Web CG blog is now syndicated out planet rdf, which is a chance for a wider linked data audience, to see what’s going on in the RWW.

 

Community Group

The CG welcomes new participants from MetaSolutions, Institut Telecom, University of Leipzig, Seoul National University and the University of Florida.   I know that some of the new members are top experts, in the payments and online currencies field, so it’s great to have that expertise on board!

The wiki has been updated in some areas.  As with most wikis, small incremental changes seem to work best.  We have a new page covering several Social Systems and a stub page used to collect Screencasts.  Additionally, the Global Square (occupy movement) have told us are keen to use RWW standards in their upcoming drupal based social project.

Applications

The big news this month is that the first RWW interoperation, between hetrogeneous social networks was achieved, using the semantic pingback protcol.  Congratulations to Andrei Sambra (My Profile) and Kingsley (Openlink Data Spaces) for reaching this big milestone.  In the coming weeks, we hope to see more social networks join the system via pingback, including work being done on bergnet and tabulator/data.fm, and hopefully many more!

Great work from the team behind My Profile for putting this fantastic new RWW social system live.  The source code is also available on github.  For those that have not yet seen it, you can sign up here:

https://my-profile.eu/profile.php

Although My Profile is WebID based, it should be pointed out that the universal nature allows it to be extended to almost any login method.  The philosophy of using HTTP URIs to describe things, that has served Facebook and others so well, is just a staring point, rather than, a closed loop.

The system includes, (FOAF) profile creation and edit, personal wall, subscriptions, private messaging, public wall, certificate generation, friends list and lookup, federated login using your own FOAF, an application platform, cross platform messaging and much more.  Do check it out!

 

Last but not least…

A picture speaks a thousand words.  Kudos to Sarven Capadisli for this innovative use of his WebID in the DERI cafe!

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

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

Headlines

Summary

As the web celebrates its 23rd birthday, there is no sign of letting up, of the exponential growth.  Linked data has seen continued impressive uptake both in ecommerce an govt. with the World Bank becoming the latest addition to the LOD cloud.

Communications and Outreach

RWW now has its own logo and Google+ presence at:

https://plus.google.com/111698071335880876088/posts

Many thanks to Jürgen Jakobitsch for setting this up and creating the artwork.  Please let us know if you’d like to help with the outreach/management of this group.

Community Group

The community groups welcomes 3 new members.  Ivan Herman, the lead of  Semantic Web Activity at the W3C, Sebastian Trueg, long time contributor to foaf protocols and, and László Török, a member of Martin Hepp’s, world class E-Business team, in Munich.  Welcome, Wilkommen and légy üdvözölve!

The wiki has been improved slightly with new sections on authentication and a new area for existing projects.  This will improve over time, please feel free to add your updates.

Applications

There are a number of promising applications and frameworks, mostly at the pre alpha stage, but I would expect the first batch to be released in Q2 of 2012.  Danny Ayers shared some interesting design for his seki project.   There was a short blog showing tabulator’s neat integration with facebook open graph.

On the social side we seem to be getting close with the next versions of fcns and bergi’s new revamp of resource me.  I’m very much looking forward to interop between these two platforms, openlink data spaces, tabulator social pane, facebook, and much more.

Last but not least…

My app of the month outside the read write web group is map4rdf, a faceted browsing linked geo data application.  It may be a fascinating experiment to try to integrate geo local data with existing platform.  I look forward so seeing mapping technology become a first class citizen of the read write web.

If you got this far, thanks for reading … please feel free to add your news or comments!

Using Tabulator to link to Facebook in Chrome

Melvin Carvalho

Posted on

The following is a simple demonstration of the web version of tabulator being used to link to a facebook profile.

Click the following link in CHROME (it may work in other browsers too)

http://demo.data.fm/demo_facebook

*Disclaimer* very much alpha / work in progress of a port of tabulator functionality to the web.  Some parts may be broken in some browsers, some parts may be broken in all browsers.  We’re working on fixing and much more, including an almost built social interface, probably Q2 of 2012 …

1. If you managed to get it working you should see something like


2. Now try clicking on “hugh.glaser”

Nicely structured Facebook data!

3. You can even explore facebook predicates

And the ‘code to generate’ all this?  ONE line of turtle!

<#me> <#KNOWS> <https://graph.facebook.com/hugh.glaser> .

Is it perfect?  NO.

Can we make it awesome?  YES! :)

With almost a billion profiles, facebook is winning the race to adopt linked data.  It’s a testament to their implementation that I had to do very little and everything ‘just worked’.

There’s no other integration in the social web anywhere near as seamless as this.  IMHO it has the potential to usher in a new era of the Web, so long as we manage to keep the momentum of the web of documents and linked data going for long enough!