Data Ownership and Interoperability for a Decentralized Social Semantic Web

Congrats to Andrei on receiving his PhD.  It is now available online, and a
great read.

http://myprofile-project.org/thesis/manuscript_en.pdf

Abstract

Ensuring personal data ownership and interoperability for decentralized
social
Web applications is currently a debated topic, especially when taking into
consideration the aspects of privacy and access control. Since the user's
data
are such an important asset of the current business models for most social
Websites, companies have no incentive to share data among each other or to
offer users real ownership of their own data in terms of control and
transparency
of data usage. We have concluded therefore that it is important to improve
the social Web in such a way that it allows for viable business models while
still being able to provide increased data ownership and data
interoperability
 compared to the current situation