=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-405/paper-3
|storemode=property
|title=Beyond Walled Gardens: Open Standards for the Social Web
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-405/keynote2.pdf
|volume=Vol-405
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/Halpin08
}}
==Beyond Walled Gardens: Open Standards for the Social Web==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-405/keynote2.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
   Beyond Walled Gardens: Open Standards for
                the Social Web

                                  Harry Halpin

              Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems
                               University of Edinburgh
                                  2 Buccleuch Place
                             Edinburgh, United Kingdom
                                 H.Halpin@ed.ac.uk

    Now that the Social Web has finally reached truly widespread adoption, the
question remains: Why can’t users have their data back? To flip the question,
what could researchers discover and application-developers create if they had
access to the masses of social data currently spread throughout the Web? Luckily,
the building-blocks that allow us to open up these closed walls of data exist right
now: all that is missing is a strategy for putting it together. As has been said
before: You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.
    One weak point is conceptual: Social data portability and privacy are usually
viewed as opposing forces. Yet data portability and privacy are mutual benefits
that a framework for a mature Social Web could bring users. Today, the walled
garden of data fundamentally leads to less security and privacy for users. For
example, the lack of portability does not imply a lack of privacy: the data of
users may be data-mined and is all-too- portable, for it can be easily sold to
parties unknown to the users without their explicit knowledge. Furthermore, the
lack of portability has made it common practice for many social web services to
ask users to give third-party services access e-mail inboxes, an insecure practice
that has already easily led to identity theft. By forcing users to have their data
spread throughout the Web under multiple accounts, users often just repeat
passwords and user-names, leading to insecure transactions. Solving these real-
world problems should not be rocket science, although it may be Web science.
    Technically, solutions to all these problems already exist. SAML (Security
Assertion Markup Language) in general, and OpenID, provide a usable frame-
work for multi-site log-ins. OAuth can provide authenticated API access. For
data portability, a host of incompatible APIs and data formats exist, ranging
from OpenSocial to the Contact API, from the XFN microformat to FOAF. One
large question that must be answered is how can all these different standards
be harmonized, and on what level of abstraction? Given the large amount of
work already put into these technologies, instead of asking for a single API to
be adopted, a more sensible strategy would be move to an extensible and simple
modeling framework, and rather shockingly the Semantic Web may very well be
the best solution out there.
    Yet, the Semantic Web has its own host of problems, and despite the years
of research, very little research has gone into maturing the social side of the
Semantic Web. This points out a fundamental flaw in the design of RDF as it
stands today: While publishing triples in the wild may do for publicly-available
Linked Data, this model of deployment will not work for Social Web. Instead,
somehow privacy and data provenance must be built into the very core of the
data-format, and be easily accessible. Furthermore, the work on trust needs
to go beyond Goldbeck’s famous Trust Ontology. How does the Semantic Web
and identity providers interact? How can we support both identity integration
and multiple profiles for different uses? And on a very basic level, what are the
mappings between vCard, XFN, and FOAF? What precisely is the core of social
data that should be standardized, and what other components should be left to
develop in a decentralized manner? These questions are seemingly simple, and
one is unlikely to get a dissertation working on them. Without concrete answers
and running code to solve these practical questions, the Semantic Web vision is
unlikely to take off.
   Luckily, the World Wide Web Consortium provides just such a process where
academia, industry, and developers can discuss the future of the Social Web,
create a strategy, and then implement it. Furthermore, in a consensus-driven
manner, various parties can get on board, without the fear of patent trolls due
to the W3C’s Royalty-Free Patent Policy. Lastly, the W3C process can help
guarantee that various other parts of the Web, like the Mobile Web, can stay
involved. What is needed from academia is that the research priorities of the
Semantic Web move beyond its roots in classical artificial intelligence to the
problem of creating a framework for collective intelligence on the Social Web.

</pre>