Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (June 2013)
Summary
The World and The Web, was rocked this month to learn about centralized access to data storage, by the controversial prism surveillance program. Microsoft (2007), Yahoo! (2008), Google (2009), Facebook (2009), Paltalk (2009), YouTube (2010), AOL (2011), Skype (2011), and Apple were implicated, with many commentators concerned by the loss of privacy.
Yahoo! continues its Linked Data adoption with the announcement the open-source code release and public demo of Glimmer, a search engine for RDF data. Based on the Hadoop search engine technology, it allows querying of the web data commons knowledge base of over 750 million triples.
IndieWeb, a gathering of web creators, sharing technology to empower users to host their own user profile, had its annual gathering, in Portland Oregon. The Webmention technology that we covered previously was tested in the wild. Also a an interesting new system, WebFist, was launched which allows users to write mirrored claims based on their email address.
Communications and Outreach
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have heard of the recent rise to fame of bitcoin, the peer to peer crypto currency. Bitcoin has it’s own web of trust for the OTC (over the counter) market. The founder (aka nanotube) has agreed to let us bootstrap their web pages with a trust based ontology. I made a short proposal to help us develop along these lines.
Mozilla mentioned that they are also in the process of created their open badges system, so perhaps a collaboration and shared concepts could be possible.
Community Group
RWW welcomes Erik Mannens and Miel Vander Sande from iMinds Multimedia lab. Some of you may recall their recent work on R&Wbase: git for triples, presented at WWW 2013. The wiki updated with a section for newcomers including the newly minted Linked Data Glossary.
Sandeep Shetty has been leading the way with two new read/write protocols in the space of two months. WebMention has been gaining traction and was tested at indie web camp 2013. But also he has developed a system for federated “likes”. Looking forward to testing this out with my web identity!
Applications
Congratulations go to W3C stalwart, Sandro Hawke, a recipient of the Knight Prototype Fund, and will be developing a read write cloud storage application called Crosscloud. CrossCloud consists of a set of protocols and tools that allows providers to give individuals control of their data, choose who can access it and move it to other systems as needed.
A new authentication protocol, hawk, from the people that brought us OAuth promises to correct a few of the issues. It seems to work nicely with URIs as identifiers so perhaps can be a universal authentication system for the web. Finally, I put together a quick intro on how to install tabulator in firefox, more to come in this series next month, as I hope to give a demo of the social pane interacting with other networks.
Last but not least…
Last but not least a look at how Linked Data is being used to tackle hunger and poverty around the world. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) are working toward data on every country around the world, data about malnutrition, child mortality rates, ecology, rainfall, and much more. The raw, structured data is available here in RDF. The LOD version is available here.
