[OLR] Exercise 8.3 Data portability, FOAF and the Semantic Web

Like a chain letter, our data seems to move within and between tools like Facebook and Twitter. Is this a good thing?

I think that data following us around is a good thing. To me data being able tomove around and between web-based applications is a sign of data maturity and flexibility. A practical application of such a technology is that it would allow us to reuse are connect with a persistent identity across multiple sites (without being locked into to the ID given to us by any particular site). A technology that can allow data to follow us around is the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) project which is about creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. As the FOAF website states:

FOAF is part of a shift towards a Web where we can choose the sites and tools we like, without being cut off from friends who made different choices. FOAF lets you share and inter-connect information from diverse sources, move it around, and use it in unexpected new ways. http://www.foaf-project.org/

So FOAF, as an example of data following us around, is a good thing because it delivers, as Brian Kelly and Leigh Dodds point out (quoted online at http://www.communitywiki.org/en/FOAF) specific benefits:

1. The underlying data can be integrated with current and future applications
2. This can be achieved without any agreement with, or notification to, other consumers of FOAF data
3. Other application developers […] can easily develop or extend applications to process it

In other words FOAF is easily extensible and can be extended to new uses / sites / purposes that haven’t yet been imagined.

How does the FOAF tag from part of the Semantic Web and Web services via social networks?

According to http://www.foaf-project.org/about, the "Friend-of-a-friend" project or FOAF is described as:

FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online. The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

According to this website, the Semantic Web is an evolution or development where data itself becomes part of the Web and is able to be processed independently of any specific application, platform, or domain. The semantic web then, is a web of data that is not locked into applications or websites or specific documents, but which goes beyond these boundaries to allow people to link information from and across websites. This facilitates people in linking to each other by creating a metadata that identifies people, their interests, relationships and activities (Dodds, 2004. An introduction to FOAF (in) O’Reilly XML.com http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/02/04/foaf.html