WebID Integration Usecases with Semantic Web

Hi All,

My Name is Dileepa Jayakody, a Sri Lankan research student interested in
semantic web, linked-data and digital identity concepts. I have been
learning about WebID for past few days and I'm most interested about
possibilities of WebID integration to provide a verified digital identity
solution across multiple domains (SNS, email, blogs etc).

I'm interested in applying for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this year and
there are 2 projects which were most interesting for me. Both are from Apache
Stanbol <http://stanbol.apache.org/> project which suits my research
interests on semantic web.
1. Using Semantic Concepts in Federated Social Web :
STANBOL-1009<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/STANBOL-1009>
2. Entity Disambiguation for Stanbol :
STANBOL-1037<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/STANBOL-1037>

For both use-cases I find WebID an excellent option.
For use-case-1, WebID can be used for federated social-web as it supports a
user-profile with links to friend lists, photos etc, with ability to
control access to such resources over social-graph.
For use-case-2 'Person' disambiguation can be tacked by developing a
disambiguation algorithm by using WebID as a verified digital identity.

Stanbol uses Apache Clerezza <http://incubator.apache.org/clerezza/> as a
RDF engine, and AFAIK Clerezza supports WebID. However when I discussed
with Stanbol guys on their dev-list I got to know the WebID support is
currently disabled due to recent changes in WebID spec and changes in jaxrs
architecture.

I would very much like to know your suggestions and ideas on integrating
WebID for above use-cases. Further I would like your help in understanding
the architecture of WebID and how I can integrate it in existing systems to
provide a verified digital identity.

Looking forward to your ideas.

Thanks,
Dileepa