FOAFfor Social Network

Portability

Uldis Bojars (captsolo@gmail.com)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”)