FOAFfor Social Network
Portability
Uldis Bojars ([email protected])WebCamp on Social Network Portability
Cork, Ireland - March 2, 2008
Introduction
Uldis Bojārs @ DERI Galway
• FOAF - topic of this talk
• SIOC - what I am working on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data
Friend of a Friend
• Person
• Social Network / Relations
• Groups
Information about:
Friend of a Friend
• Person
• Social Network / Relations
• Groups (multiple)
• ... and more ...
Information about:
Richer Info Needed?
• RDF allows us to combine FOAFwith other vocabularies
• XFN, Relations vocabulary, ...
Richer Info Needed?
• RDF allows us to combine FOAFwith other vocabularies
• XFN, Relations vocabulary, ...
RDF = Information, Concentrated
Richer Info Needed?
• An example - Morten’s FOAF profile:
http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/author/mortenf/
Social Network Portability
• A way to identify a person (across sites)
- privacy
• A way to describe a social network
- relations between people
Components (data):
Identifying Properties
• E-Mail address (private)
• Hash of e-mail (semi-public)
• URLs (public)
• ...
Social Network Portability
• Tools / Services (do the actual “magic”)
• Data providers
- opening up social media sites
• Data users / consumers
Components (tools):
Workflow
1. Parse FOAF data (from Site A)
2. Extract a list of friends andsome data for identifying them
3. Compare this identifying data with a registry of users on Site B, report matching users
Parsing FOAF data?
Python:
import RDF
# using Redland Python bindings (librdf.org)
m = RDF.Model()
m.load('http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf')
Finding Friends? :)
SPARQL:
SELECT ?person ?mbox
WHERE {
<danbri> foaf:knows ?person .?person foaf:mbox ?mbox .
}
Case Study: LiveJournal• Data about a person (FOAF) - ✓
• Social network (FOAF) - ✓• Identifying information ...
Difficulty: this data (foaf:mbox_sha1sum)is spread across friends’ profiles.
Must be collected together before use.
Distributed Social Information
• What about using Flickr, Twitter, ... account URLs as identifyers?
- Identifying properties are only useful if other sites also knows this data
- Entering all the URLs again and again?!
• Describe these accounts once
- Applications can get this info from your homepage (e.g., described in FOAF)
http://apassant.net/blog/2008/01/12/one-foaf-fits-all/
Open Questions
• Who owns this information?
• You should have ability to backup and reuse your social network info (you own the data!)
• Privacy
• ... ... ...
Thank you!
• http://wiki.foaf-project.org/FAQ
• http://captsolo.net/info
• #webcamp (look for more info tagged “webcamp”)