Read Write Web — Q4 Summary — 2014
Summary
The web ponders moving further towards SSL, with the W3C TAG publishing a draft finding on how this could be more easily achieved. There was a great review by the EFF on progress, as well as some interesting suggestions by timbl.
Linked data continues it’s inexorable march towards the mainstream with steady progress throughout the quarter and whole year. Some good reviews are available here, here, and here. With a look forward to what we may see in 2015. A cool ontology viewer called VOWL also caught the eye.
There were some more discussion regarding the HTTP PATCH verb and how it applies to data, with specs and implementations reaching readiness. A comprehensive wishlist covering much of the future of LDP and RWW was posted by Sandro, as well as a new authentication system, called SPOT (Simple Page-Owner Token).
Communications and Outreach
Henry Story delivered an outstanding presentation at Scala eXchange conference in London, where he outlined the current state of play of the read write web and decentralized social web. An overview of the project is available on github, as well as source code.
Some conversations took place in the identity credentials group and open badges which aims to allow writing of achievements, via badges, on servers, in images and data structures, and using digital signatures.
Community Group
The LDP Patch specification is now reaching readiness and I believe the integration into GOLD is going to happen as we speak. GOLD has also now integrated JSON LD.
Community group has added a slack instance, which allows slightly more realtime chat, an API and many other features.
A stub wiki page has been added on the concept of “nanotations“, linking to Kingley’s blog explanation, feel free to add your own examples!
Applications
Some initial work has started on intelligent personal assistants. Juergen has written a sioc bot which is able to take real time conversations and convert them to linked data. Leveraging adapters in hubot the code is available on git and was up and running in just a couple of days.
I’ve also been working on a linked data robot that allows simple transfer of credit (aka marking) from one URI to another. The hope is to build out a linked data based transfer and reputation system. A slightly related side project I’ve started is virtual wallet, which will allow holding of web currencies and transfer between WebIDs, much more standards work to be done here…
Last but not Least…
An interesting system called webhose has been launched. “The Webhose.io API – Easily integrate data from hundreds of thousands of global online sources: message boards & forums, blogs, comments, reviews, news and more”. Seems like a neat bridge to pull into your apps news from many web2.0 data sources!
