=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1383/paper21
|storemode=property
|title=Standardizing the Social Web: The W3C Social Web Activity
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1383/paper21.pdf
|volume=Vol-1383
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/Halpin14
}}
==Standardizing the Social Web: The W3C Social Web Activity==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1383/paper21.pdf
Standardizing the Social Web: The W3C Social
Web Activity
Harry Halpin
World Wide Web Consortium/MIT, 32 Vassar Street Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
hhalpin@w3.org
Abstract. The focus of the Social Activity is on making “social” a
first-class citizen of the Open Web Platform by enabling standardized
protocols, APIs, and an architecture for standardized communication
among Social Web applications. These technologies are crucial for both
federated social networking and the success of social business between
and within the enterprise.
Keywords: decentralization, social web, RDF
1 Introduction
The focus of the W3C Social Activity is on making “social” a first-class citizen
of the Open Web Platform by enabling standardized protocols, APIs, and an
architecture for standardized communication among Social Web applications.
These technologies are crucial for both federated social networking and social
business between and within the enterprise and can be built on top of Linked
Data. This work will knit together via interoperable standards a number of
industry platforms, including IBM Connections, SAP Jam, Jive, SugarCRM,
and grassroots efforts such as IndieWeb.1
The mission of the Social Web Working Group,2 part of the Social Activ-
ity,3 is to define the technical protocols, Semantic Web vocabularies, and APIs
to facilitate access to social functionality as part of the Open Web Platform.
These technologies should allow communication between independent systems,
federation (also called “decentralization”) being part of the design. The Working
Group is chaired by Tantek Celik (Mozilla), Evan Prodromou (E14N), and Ar-
naud Le Hors (IBM). Also part of the Social Activity is the Social Interest Group
4
focuses on messaging and co-ordination in the larger space. This work will in-
clude a use-case document, including “social business” enterprise use-cases, as
well as vocabularies. The Interest Group is chaired by Mark Crawford (SAP).
More information is available in the charters of Social Interest Group and Social
Web Working Group.
1
http://indiewebcamp.com/
2
http://www.w3.org/Social/WG
3
http://www.w3.org/Social/
4
http://www.w3.org/Social/IG
2 Context and Vision
The Social Activity has been a goal of many members of W3C for years. The Fu-
ture of Social Networking Workshop5 was held in 2009 and attracted significant
mobile and academic interest, and led to the creation of the Social Web Incuba-
tor Group6 that produced Towards a Standards-based, Open, and Privacy-Aware
Social Web.7 Outcomes of this report included the more open Community Group
process, since much social web work was happening outside W3C as the W3C
was at the time viewed as too exclusive of grass-roots efforts. This also led to
further outreach, with the W3C sponsoring and helping organize the grass-roots
Federated Social Web conference in 2011. However, at the time there was still
not critical mass of W3C members interested in social.
More and more W3C members are embracing the concept of social standards,
thank to the work of the Social Business Community Group, in particular the
2011 Social Business Jam.8 The Social Standards: The Future of Business work-
shop (sponsored by IBM and the Open Mobile Alliance)9 developed the stan-
dards and ideas for decentralized social networking around industry use-cases. In
particular, after the workshop the OpenSocial Foundation joined the W3C, and
submitted (with other groups) the OpenSocial Activity Streams and Embedded
Experience API as a Member Submission.10
3 Goals
The Social Web Working Group will create Recommendation Track deliverables
that standardize a common JSON syntax (possibly JSON-LD)11 for social data,
a client-side API, and a Web protocol for federating social information such
as status updates. This should allow Web application developers to embed and
facilitate access to social communication on the Web. The client-side API pro-
duced by this Working Group should be capable of being deployed in a mobile
environment and based on HTML5 and the Open Web Platform.
There are a number of use cases that the work of this Working Group will
enable, including but not limited to:
– User control of personal data: Some users would like to have autonomous
control over their own social data, and share their data selectively across
various systems. For an example (based on the IndieWeb initiative), a user
could host their own blog and use federated status updates to both push and
pull their social information across a number of different social networking
sites.
5
http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/
6
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/
7
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/XGR-socialweb-20101206/
8
http://www.w3.org/2011/socialbusiness-jam/
9
http://www.w3.org/2013/socialweb/
10
https://www.w3.org/Submission/2014/SUBM-osapi-20140314/
11
http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/
– Cross-Organization Ad-hoc Federation: If two organizations wish to co-operate
jointly on a venture, they currently face the problem of securely interoper-
ating two vastly different systems with different kinds of access control and
messaging systems. An interoperable system that is based on the federation
of decentralized status updates and private groups can help two organiza-
tions communicate in a decentralized manner.
– Embedded Experiences: When a user is involved in a social process, often a
particular action in a status update may need to cause the triggering of an
application. For example, a travel request may need to redirect a user to the
company’s travel agent. Rather than re-direct the user to another page using
HTTP, this interaction could be securely embedded within page itself.
– Enterprise Social Business: In any enterprise, different systems need to com-
municate with each other about the status of various well-defined business
processes without having crucial information lost in e-mail. A system built
on the federation of decentralized status updates with semantics can help
replace email within an enterprise for crucial business processes.
4 Scope and Deliverables
The Working Group, in conjunction with Social Interest Group, will determine
the use cases that derive the requirements for the deliverables. Features that
are not implemented due to time constraints can be put in a non-normative
“roadmap” document for future work. The scope will include:
– Social Data Syntax: A JSON based syntax (possibly JSON-LD) to allow
the transfer of social information, such as status updates, across differing
social systems. One input to this deliverable is ActivityStreams 2.0.12
– Social API: A document that defines a specification for a client-side API
that lets developers embed and format third party information such as social
status updates inside Web applications. One input to this deliverable is the
OpenSocial 2.5.1 Activity Streams and Embedded Experiences APIs Member
Submission, but re-built on top of Linked Data with more secure Javascript
sandboxing.
– Federation Protocol A Web protocol to allow the federation of activity-
based status updates and other data (such as profile information) between
heterogeneous Web-based social systems. Federation should include multi-
ple servers sharing updates within a client-server architecture, and allow
decentralized social systems to be built. One possible input to this task is
WebMention13 and another possible input is the Linked Data Platform.14
Each of these technologies should not be tightly-coupled but can allow gen-
eral purpose use. Each specification must contain a section detailing any known
12
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-snell-activitystreams-05
13
http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention
14
http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/
security and privacy implications for implementers, Web authors, and end users.
The Social Web WG will actively seek an open security and privacy review for
every Recommendation-track deliverable.
5 Conclusion
For the Web to break free of centralized proprietary silos, standards are neces-
sary for a decentralized social web to interoperate. We welcome everyone from
enterprise to hackers to join this effort to, as put by Tim Berners-Lee, “re-
decentralize” the Web.
6 Acknowledgements
This work is funded in part by the European Commission FP7 European Com-
mission through the DCENT Project, which creates privacy-aware tools and
applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment.