Topic 8 Exeercise 8.3

Data portability, FOAF and the Semantic Web

1. Begin with the YouTube video at http://www.foaf-project.org/community
2. Like a chain letter, our data seems to move within and between tools like Facebook and Twitter. Is this a good thing?
3. According to http://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 they things they create and do.

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

Q1. I found the video at Youtube an interesting way to get the message across to an audience. The video reminds us about the mundane task of repeatedly filling in the same details about yourself each time you sign up to a social networking site. It would be so much easier if you did not have to go through that process each time. I, in particular found it very frustrating trying to sign up for Second life as for some reason the registration process was not that fond of me. Life would be so much simpler if there was a uniform procedure that just automatically filled out your details allowing the user to get on with the task of simply using the social networking site.

Q2. I think that users of networking sites should be able to take their data with them when they leave a site. I understand by being able to do this businesses cannot send products etc to entice the user back on board, but I think it would encourage networking sites to ensure that the services they provide are up to scratch so users will not want to leave.

Q3: The connection between Social Networking Sites and semantic community portals is strong. The friend of a friend (FOAF) ontology has been used by many social networking sites such as Tribe and it describes member profiles and their relationships. Using FOAF ontology is leading to interoperability between the different standalone social networking sites. This will increase the number of “happy chances” occurring between people who utilise these online worlds by bringing them all together in a universal social network. For this to happen though, according to Wikipedia “more social networking sites will be required to use FOAF, SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) and other related ontologies making the data within them distributed and decentralized as opposed to being locked into proprietary sites or applications.