Introduction - MyProfile.

Hello,

My name is Andrei Sambra and I am responsible for MyProfile [1], a 
recent project aiming to provide a decentralized identity platform for 
the social Web, while conforming to existing W3C standards related to 
linked data.

Even though I have been a member of the LDP group for a while, I haven't 
been very active. I would like to change this and become more involved, 
since I believe that my project fits really well the scope of this group.

Please allow me to introduce my work.

MyProfile intends to be, above everything else, a decentralized identity 
platform. It's goal is to put users in control of their online data, by 
providing them with both access control for what they share and do on 
the Web, as well as physical control of their data. The last part is 
done by hosting the data on a device under the user's physical control, 
e.g. a FreedomBox[2].

MyProfile uses WebID[3] to provide users with unique identities, which 
in turn relies on the WebID authentication protocol to perform secure 
authentication in one click (more details on the WebID page).

Users can either have one identity with fine-grained access control 
policies, or multiple identities (even temporary ones), which make use 
of some (or all) profile data elements. For example, an identity called 
"e-commerce" will only contain relevant data for online financial 
transactions, while excluding the user's list of friends, or any other 
information that is not pertinent to purchasing goods online.

I mentioned earlier that MyProfile fits very well within LDP's scope.  I 
believe that for a web application to be truly decentralized on the long 
run, interoperability must be ensured, which is why LDP will help a lot.

The core of MyProfile is based on a REST API[4]. This API handles 
requests from UIs, as well as from external sources. Through this API, 
the application will eventually offer RESTful ways of interacting with 
user data. For example, users can perform HTTP GET requests to view 
someone's profile data (mainly based on FOAF), according to the 
specified Accept-Type format (turtle/n3, rdf+xml, ntriples). Requesting 
users that are not authenticated will receive the public "view" of the 
profile, while authenticated users will receive a "view" specific to 
existing access control policies assigned to them. On the other hand, 
authenticated POST and PUT operations on containers like 
https://example.com/people/andrei/wall/ will allow users to write on 
someone's wall.

I hope my description of MyProfile project was enough to catch your 
interest. Please feel free to ask me any questions either by mail or in 
person, as I will be at TPAC in Lyon on Monday and Tuesday for the WebID 
and RWW meetings.

All the best,
Andrei

[1] http://myprofile-project.org/
[2] http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
[3] http://www.w3.org/community/webid/
[4] https://github.com/MyProfile/rest-api

Received on Monday, 29 October 2012 08:13:28 UTC