Block diagram narrative

From W3C Wiki

Social Block Diagram Narrative

The purpose of the block diagram is to break down the elements and enabling technologies that form generalizable attributes of a social network. The objective for building such diagram is to have representation of the on-going standardization work in this area and identify technologies where the W3C may support an open standard.

The idea behind supporting open standards in the social network area is to enable individual people or businesses to enable easier, and thereby faster, adoption of social methods. Wikipedia is created by the anonymous collaboration of users. Craigslist is a hyper efficient exchange of ideas and items for sale. How can we standardize these and other processes to further encourage innovation through online social networking?

Social networks are designed to let people discover and maintain relationships, through conversations, content sharing or even collaboration on a common deliverable such as source code, document or library knowledge. Relationships can be between individuals, or groups or where people follow a non-human object like an event or business. For example, a social network can form around a mutual interest and collaborate to achieve a shared goal. To achieve such goal, individuals, groups, companies or events will have to create their identity in the social network, create interactions and manage their community.

The Social Block Diagram splits a social network into five categories: 1) Human Interactions – what humans can do on the social network, 2) About The Human, - what describes the human on the social network, 3) Ubiquitous Attributes and 4) Technical Foundations – technology that make all the previous notions implemented in the social network.


Block Diagram Elements Human interactions is a group activities people can do together.

1. Human Interactions

     a.	Sharing types of content
     b.	Text, video, audio, location, bookmarks
     c.        Document
     d.	Events (described by content ontology)
     e.	Work Flow - response, collaboration, time stamps
     f.	Messaging - e-mail like, text chat, connected objects, mobile
     g.	Group Dynamics - multiple people in a group
     h.	Collaboration / Newsfeed - Data structures, alerts/notifications, embedding
     i.        Reactions - comments, re-share, like, recommendations, tags


About the Human are the attributes and link associated with a particular user including their real time status, as well as more persistent attributes. The ‘human’ would set control access to their profiles.

2. About The Human

     a.	Identity: name, username, government assigned numbers
     b.	Social Graph: Contacts, Groups,Brands, Access control
     c.	Addressing: physical addresses, e-mails, phone numbers, URI
     d.	Profile: Profile page ??, Profile data, Presence, Location, Skills
             

Ubiquitous attributes cross profiles of people, things and the interactions they enter

3. Ubiquitous attributes

     a.	Search 
     b.	Biz/Mining Intelligence

Technical foundations are geared at an open system that can work across multiple platforms.

4. Technical foundations

     a.	Client API’s
     b.	REST
     c.	Widgets
     d.	Analytics
     e.	Real-time notifications
     f.	Login standards
     g.	Discovery
     h.	Data Structures, Content graph / ontology
     i.	Content Delivery
             i.	Wiki, blog, html+, Microblog