The activity of this group is to apply Web standards to trusted read and write operations.
w3c-cg/rwwGroup's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
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 🙂
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.
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.
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:
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!
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.
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!
*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!
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!
Please add any other relevant protocols you can think of, more annotation of what’s there appreciated. I’m assuming standard Wiki rules apply: “just do it”
This group seeks to bootstrap the nascent Read-Write aspect of the WWW via collaboration on specs and tools that ultimately make reading and writing on the WWW a natural usage pattern.
Key technology for making this effort a reality lies in the use of the WebID protocol as a mechanism for Web scale Access Control Lists (ACL) applied to Web Addresses (URLs).
Of immediate interest, based work that’s been incubating (somewhat) for years in the Data Wiki. Basically, the application of Content Wiki functionality to more fine grained resources that serve to represent actual data objects via linked data graphs.
w3c-cg/rww
