Read Write Web — 2013 — End of Year Summary

The blogging system in the CG seems to be broken, so hopefully this will
make it as email.  I'll post to the blog when it's working again.  Happy
new year to all! :)

Summary

Privacy was the overriding theme on the Web this year, following the
revelations, by Edward Snowden <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden>,
and others.   For the first time, the extent to which the web has become
used for surveillance, on billions of individuals, has become apparent.
This has resulted in a new initiative being launched, called, "The Web We
Want <http://webwewant.org/>", promoting the protection of personal user
information.

At the W3C, RDFa <http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/> has become an official
REC and JSON LD has
reached<http://www.w3.org/blog/SW/2013/11/07/proposed-recommendations-for-json-ld/>candidate
recommendation.  This year has seen continued Linked Data
rollouts, with among others, gmail's support for JSON LD and Yahoo's search
engine, Glimmer <http://glimmer.research.yahoo.com/>.  McKinsey's also came
out with a report this year saying that Linked Data can unlock $3 - $5
trillion annually<http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/open_data_unlocking_innovation_and_performance_with_liquid_information>
.

SPARQL 1.1 <http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/REC-sparql11-overview-20130321/> is
now an official REC, which augments the query language to allow both
reading and writing.  The RWW community group has this year helped with
related specs such as Linked Data
Platform<http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/wiki/Main_Page>,
as well as incubating some of our own ideas, and creating apps to
demonstrate using standards to read and write.

Communications and Outreach

This year our members have interacted with quite a few other groups at the
W3C, including the Linked Data Profile Working
Group<http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/wiki/Main_Page>,
Web Payments <http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/>, Web App
Store<http://www.w3.org/community/webappstore/>,
WebID <http://www.w3.org/community/webid/>, W3ID <https://w3id.org/>, Federated
Social Web <http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/>, Social
Business<http://www.w3.org/community/socbizcg/>,
Unhosted <http://www.w3.org/community/unhosted/>, RDF JavaScript
Libraries<http://www.w3.org/community/rdfjs/>Community Groups, other
standards bodies such as
OASIS <https://www.oasis-open.org/standards>, OpenID
Foundation<http://openid.net/foundation/>,
OpenSocial Foundation <http://opensocial.org/>, IETF
<http://www.ietf.org/>and projects such as
Tabulator <https://github.com/linkeddata/tabulator>,
lod2<http://lod2.eu/Welcome.html>,
diaspora <https://joindiaspora.com/>, cozycloud <https://www.cozycloud.cc/>,
freedombox <https://freedomboxfoundation.org/>, lorea <https://lorea.org/>,
gnu.io, drupal <https://drupal.org/>, bitcoin
otc<http://bitcoin-otc.com/trust.php>,
indieweb <http://indiewebcamp.com/>, createjs
<http://www.createjs.com/>and many more!

We look forward to working together to help, create new standards for
reading and writing!


Community Group

A warm welcome to everyone that joined the community group this year, in
particular, to those that took part in discussions.  The RWW now is up to
86 participants, making it the 9th largest of the 160 business and
community groups a the W3C.

Our group has worked on various read and write technology standards this
year, in close collaboration with the Linked Data Platform WG.  One topic
we are very interested in ACLs, and there has been
discussion<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rww/2013Oct/0017.html>about
creating a formal spec.  Other techs we have worked on include
semantic
pingback <http://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/Pingback>,
webmention<http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention>,
rel types for acls<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rww/2013Aug/0030.html>,
delegated protected
resources<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rww/2013Aug/0028.html>,
User header <http://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/User_Header>, web of
trust<http://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/Trust>,
and a first attempt to bring all our ideas together into a read write web
spec <http://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/Draft_Spec>.

[image: Inline images 1]
Applications

The first RWW applications have started to spring up this year, compliant
with web standards and W3C best practices.  Commodity storage solutions aim
to separate cloud storage from applications and identity.  rww.io and
data.fm are two of the first RWW solutions to offer a distributed file
system.  Virtuoso Open Source
7<http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/dataspace/doc/dav/wiki/Main/#2013-04-24:%20Virtuoso%207.0%20Unleashed%21>was
also a major upgrade.  In the works are more solutions such as
stample <http://stample.co> and crosscloud <http://crosscloud.org/>.

For identity providers, my-profile <https://my-profile.eu/> received many
upgrades, MIT has now become an identity <https://webid.mit.edu/> provider,
and OpenLink have launched YouID <http://youid.openlinksw.com/> on desktop
and mobile.

The first RWW app area <https://github.com/rww-apps> on github was created
by Andrei, with an example app for a linked data
calendar<https://github.com/rww-apps/ld-cal>.
I also added a "hello world <http://hello.rww.io/hello.html>" app to show
how a simple visitor counter can be incremented using PUT, PATCH or SPARQL
Update.  Some more updates to tabulator this year, including some blog
posts<http://www.w3.org/community/rww/tag/tabulator/>on getting
started and distributed microblogging.

Other apps released, that interacted with our group, were
meritora<https://meritora.com/>,
a linked data payments service, and Cozycloud <https://www.cozycloud.cc/>,
a cloud based application framework.  Looking forward to many more apps
next year!

[image: Inline images 2]
Last but not least…

We were extremely saddened, this year, to learn of the terrible loss of
Aaron Schwartz.  Our profound condolences go out to his family and friends,
including many of those in the Linked Data Community.