Re: telconf 07-11-2012 : what is webid

On 16 November 2012 10:59, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:

>
> On 16 Nov 2012, at 00:08, Jürgen Jakobitsch <j.jakobitsch@semantic-web.at>
> wrote:
>
> >
> >> I'm designing systems, with interoperability and adoption in mind. In
> >> the case of WebID, we believe that it means "building on top of LDP",
> >> which I recall is the only W3C Working Group that is chartered to work
> >> on defining the platform (Read-Write) for RDF data *on the Web*. This
> >> Community Group has *no chance* to bring WebID to LDP if it's not
> >> built on top of LDP, you need to realize that.
> >
> > hi alexandre,
> >
> >
> > 1. webID is not an annex to ldp, it's neither on top of ldp or else
> > related, why should it be. should we redefine dope, sioc, foaf just to
> > please ldp?
> > (let that sound to your ears : a doap:Project is a #URI that denotes a
> > software project)
> > 2. webID has nothing to do with deployment and data-io, hence it has
> > nothing to do with ldp.
> > 3. not every triple on this planet will be hosted on an ldp system
> > sometimes soon
> > 4. on the other i could always host a webID on an ldp system, that's it
> > 5. webID does NOT rely on ldp. when i choose to host my webID on an ldp
> > system there WILL be a turtle representation (if the ldp spec says so)
> > and i CAN have a #URI, that's it.
>
> Well argued that they are not the same.
> On the other hand we should consider some very important things that it
> will
> bring:
>
>   1. Automatic provisioning of WebIDs to robots and other agents.
>
>     A software robot could create an account by POSTing a request for a
> new collection
>   provision the WebID profile document quickly, and get going. So this
> could make it easy
>   to help a lot of apps get WebIDs
>
>   2. Pingback and friending
>
>     one can add friending requests using Pingback to an LDP server in a
> more generic way
> than what we had now, thereby creating and growing the social networks
> strength.
>
>   3. A community that needs WebID
>
>    LDP can't really work without WebID over TLS in my view - not
> efficiently at least. It
> needs ways to do distributed access control - if only because large
> companies want to
> deploy it. They will want to use it on the open internet, and if they do
> then they need
> a way to do distributed authentication - because they will inevitably have
> information they
> want to protect: e.g.: they can't allow everyone in the world to write RDF
> to their system.
>
>  But they can only get very negative pushback if WebID over TLS is tied
> directly into their
> framework. So we that is why we have to decouple WebID and public keys.
> And we develop
> the Identity Interoperability spec/wiki page to help show how everyone can
> participate.
>
>
> In fact a lot of people here already are working on LDP
>     - Openlink is working in this area.
>     - Andrei is working on enabling my-profile for LDP
>     - I am implementing it in Scala
>     - Joe Presbrey's data.fm has WebID and something close to LDP
>     - .... ( anyone else? who is doing WebID Auth over TLS and LDP?)
>
> So alignment is important - not very difficult to do for us anyway.
>

Very good points.

I often keep thinking back to this blog post from 2004 by Jo Smarr, then at
plaxo, now at google

"Plaxo and FOAF: What’s the right model?"

http://blog.plaxo.com/2004/02/plaxo_and_foaf_/

Summary of Open Issues:
Importing and exporting rich contact information with FOAF
Incorporating permissions and restricted viewing into a FOAF framework
Offering FOAF features without confusing people that don’t use FOAF
Sharing your contact list without compromising the privacy of you or your
contacts
Using plain text e-mail addresses vs. SHA1 sums (which is better where)

"There’s been a lot of discussion lately on blogs and elsewhere about how
social networking services should support FOAF. We totally agree that
there’s a great opportunity here to let users participate in multiple
services without having to duplicate data and also to let developers build
external services that can take advantage of the data gathered by these
networks. But before we can fulfill these dreams we need to address some
technical issues and, more importantly, figure out how to respect privacy
in the process. We hope that some of you will have good suggestions on
these complex issues, and you can be assured that as soon as we’ve found
good solutions, Plaxo will be very FOAF-friendly!"

It's been EIGHT years since that blog post and LDP will be ready 10 years
after it.  We've had big players including google and facebook ready to
adopt FOAF but the issues of permissions and access control have not yet
been fully addressed, imho.  This is a great opportunity to put this right,
as there is certainly an industry need.

CC: danbri


>
>
> > to the topic of speed : i'd rather ask first (maybe also a second time)
> > and shoot later. changing specs is not really a good idea to do it too
> > often.
> >
> > to the topic of discussion : we are simple "discussing" the very
> > definition of webID - that is NOT a waste of time.
> >
> > wkr http://www.turnguard.com/turnguard
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > | Jürgen Jakobitsch,
> > | Software Developer
> > | Semantic Web Company GmbH
> > | Mariahilfer Straße 70 / Neubaugasse 1, Top 8
> > | A - 1070 Wien, Austria
> > | Mob +43 676 62 12 710 | Fax +43.1.402 12 35 - 22
> >
> > COMPANY INFORMATION
> > | web       : http://www.semantic-web.at/
> > | foaf      : http://company.semantic-web.at/person/juergen_jakobitsch
> > PERSONAL INFORMATION
> > | web       : http://www.turnguard.com
> > | foaf      : http://www.turnguard.com/turnguard
> > | g+        : https://plus.google.com/111233759991616358206/posts
> > | skype     : jakobitsch-punkt
> > | xmlns:tg  = "http://www.turnguard.com/turnguard#"
>
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>
>