Re: Pre-Telecon Introductions

Hi all,

I am Henry Story. I studied Analytical Philosophy at University of  
London, then branched back into software engineering which I had  
gotten into around age 13, as I re-discovered that I could live much  
better that way.

I went to the first JavaOne in 1995 which opened up a job at AltaVista  
where I developed the BabelFish machine translation service. After  
trying a number of startups after 2001, I finally found some time to  
develop OpenSource software, and helped James Gosling on a simple Blog  
Editor, which I enhanced with a semantic web database. This got me a  
job at Sun Microsystems, where I am still working.

At Sun, I worked a lot on the IETF Atom format and Atom Protocol  
working group, and took on the role of Semantic Web evangelist, which  
led me to look a lot closer at social networks. I built a simple  
semantic web address book [1] to show the power of linked data as  
applied to SNs. The main feedback I received on this was the need  
people felt for being able to keep information private. In search of a  
way to do distributed Access Control I found a surprisingly simple  
mechanism, which we named foaf+ssl, to do this using existing  
browsers. I presented the AddressBook and FOAF+SSL at last year's  
JavaOne conference. Since then the community has grown exponentially  
[3] I am really happy to say.

In order to help us understand the theoretical underpinnings of this  
protocol we have published "FOAF+SSL: RESTful Authentication for the  
Social Web" [4] to be presented at the ESWC in Greece next week. A  
good example of theory being guided by experience (guided by theory  
recursively).

   I believe with the authors of a recent Aspen Institute Report [5]  
that the Social Web is essential to the flourishing of Cloud  
Computing, and so am very happy to be participating in this forum. I  
look forward to a great year of cooperation and insights.


Regards,

Henry Story

Social Web Architect
Sun Microsystems		
Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish


[1] https://sommer.dev.java.net/AddressBook.html
[2] now an audio enhanced slide cast "Building Secure Open &  
Distributed Social Networks"
     http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/building_secure_and_distributed_social
[3] for a list of pointers see the http://esw.w3.org/topic/foaf+ssl
     for the early history of foaf+ssl see
     http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-protocols/2008-October/000000.html
[4] http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/foaf_ssl_restful_authentication_for
[5] http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/identity_in_the_age_of

Received on Thursday, 28 May 2009 20:53:36 UTC