Semantic Web & BBCPanel discussion, 30 July 2008

“Where does OpenID fit in?”

Dan Brickley <http://danbri.org/>

Semantic WebProject

The

5 mins SemWeb - 5 mins OpenID - 5 mins scenarios - 5 mins bad timingoutline:

“To a computer, the Web is a flat, boring world, devoid of meaning. This is a pity, as in fact documents on the Web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them.”

“For example, a document might describe a person. The title document to a house describes a house and also the ownership relation with a person.”

“Adding semantics to the Web involves two things: allowing documents which have information in machine-readable forms, and allowing links to be created with relationship values. [this will] help us exploit the information to a greater extent than our own reading.”

Tim Berners-Lee "W3 future directions" keynote - 1st World Wide Web Conference Geneva, May 1994

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The Web:

The World:

‘Let machines use the claims made in Web pages’

what objects do they describe?

what relationships do they claim?

who made the claims? what other claims support them?

Web of Data - a linked information system

Friend of a Friend

FOAF is a project about sharing information in the Web. It's about ways of describing things using computers, so

that those descriptions can be linked together, mixed up with other data, and searched.

People, groups, accounts, photos, IM, life on the Web.

Machine-readable pages, de-centralised, freely extensible.

OpenIDMy OpenID is my homepage, http://danbri.org/

[+]: fewer passwords. information linking.

[-]: fewer passwords. information linking.

“Log in using a Web page as ID”

It could also be my Flickr, MySpace, Yahoo, etc. profiles.

500 million+ such pages can be used as OpenIDs.

<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://danbri.livejournal.com/" />

Before:-username, password on each Web site

-email account used to prove ownership

After:-username is a Web URL

-if you prove you control that page, you’re in

Laconi.ca - Open Microblogging

Logging in for first time:

User is bounced over to their ‘identity provider’ site

(how to explain this to them?)

Jyte.com:

login with an OpenID.make claims about the world and other users.

Garlik - qdos

*******

(karma aggregators?)

FriendFeed - a Social Web aggregator

FOAF/XFN in Google Social Graph API:

“The Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the web more easily available.”

“...indexes the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared

connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections

between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.”

Google Social Graph API

“find other ‘me’ URLs, given an URL.”

Q: http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/otherme?q=danbri.org

"http://del.icio.us/danbri": { "attributes": { "rss": "http://del.icio.us/rss/danbri", "url": "http://del.icio.us/danbri", "profile": "http://del.icio.us/danbri" } ...http://mystatus.skype.com/danbrickley.xml ...http://profiles.aim.com/danbri_2002 ...mailto:danbri@danbri.org ...mailto:danbri@w3.org ...http://danbri.livejournal.com/ ...photo: http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/68202348/134454

A:

Scenarios: Music

• Music: all MySpace users have an OpenID

• Includes1000s of artists (& managers, PR, promoters)

• What if we knew (via MusicBrainz) that logins from http://www.myspace.com/coldplay/ really were Coldplay?

• tipjars, special feature sites, “log in to fix this”, ...

• today music, tommorrow news? (eg. open.id.ee ...)

Scenarios 2: Social Media• Social Web sites are great for discussing media

• But source site lose out as fun moves elsewhere:

• what demographic liked our work? who did we reach? how did word spread? do we have license to republish comments and recommendations?

• identi.ca’s use of OpenID, Creative Commons and FOAF shows how microblog discussions could find their way back to source site

• login with your Flickr ID to give usage permission

Scenarios 3: Filter & Find• how do we filter, search, present comments,

recommendations once aggregated? who are ‘we’ anyway? (some of this will happen on Desktop)

• OpenID + SemWeb allows users to express their own filters (using private or public data)

• People I’ve emailed with; worked with; family.

• People my friends rate; or whose blog I read.

• Friends-of-friends from the country I’m reading a news article about?

Summary

• OpenID rollout is happening

• Usability studies needed (eg. mobile use, accessibility)

• People’s online IDs will be URLs; likely several

• These can be private and anonymous (yet useful)

• When they’re not, we have a world of possibility

• Technologies combine in unpredictable ways