Re: Google Summer of Code & WebID

On 28 Apr 2013, at 20:27, Dileepa Jayakody <dileepajayakody@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Henry et al,
> 
> Thanks a lot for your valuable insights and pointing to such interesting projects at W3C available for GSOC.
> I'm most interested about the project "LDP implementation with WebID and WebACL at its core" and would like to get more details about it and how I should proceed in applying for it. I'm targeting to base my research on implementing a verified identity provider framework and I think this project is really aligned with my objectives. 
> 
> I have no prior experience in scala development but I'm a quick learner and I believe I can master scalar development in a short time. To give a brief introduction about myself, I recently joined LK Domain Registry as a research assistant and started reading for an MSc by Research at University of Moratuwa in computer science. My research interests are in the areas of digital identity, social web, linked-data and semantic technologies. Prior to joining LK Domain Registry, I was a software engineer for 1.5 years at WSO2 (Pvt) Ltd [1], the opensource SOA company where I was a member of the carbon team which is the kernel of the WSO2 Product stack which are OSGi based products. I have a good development background on java, web services, OSGi and maven. I also have a good understanding about the opensource development process and culture as WSO2 follows the Apache model for software development. I have also participated in OSGi Community Event 2012 co-located with EclipseCon 2012 by giving a tech.talk on "Building A Modular Server Platform with OSGi" [2]. 

Hi, 
 
 	it looks like either Clerezza or the Scala LDP platforms could be of interest to you.

Clerezza is OSGi based so it seems to fit your skill set best.  The banana LDP Scala 
library does not use OSGi, and I am not sure how easy or difficult it would be to make
it work with Clerezza. My guess is that one could replace the whole RDF stack in Clerezza 
with it, but you may have a lot of pushback there to doing that - or at least there was pushback
a couple of years ago by large parts of the team against using Scala in a 
deeper. Clerezza used to have some Scala in it ( that is how I got going) for the UI.
But you should really ask what direction they are taking  there.

Scala is a lot to learn. It is a functional OO language which is very powerful, and it leads
one to think about programming in a completely new way. (I have learnt more about 
programming since doing Scala that I had for years and years before hand.) I think 
you may need to take one month full time to get reasonably good at it - and then you 
will start seeing mountain ranges that you had never even contemplated before hand. 
It will require doing a lot of exercises to get good at it though. 

Oderski has an online course one can do with videos here:
   https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun
Which is a good way to start if one also has a good introductory book.
( I am not sure if one can still subscribe to the course )

There are also a lot of exercises available here:
  http://bblfish.net/tmp/2013/04/20/

An important emerging book  is: "Functional Programming in Scala"
http://www.manning.com/bjarnason/
But this is difficult and only to be looked at when you have gone through the previous
stages.

The LDP google summer of code project requires advanced knowledge of Scala,
so you'd have to ask Alexandre Bertails if you can join. 

But otherwise we should take this off list, as it is no longer that relevant to WebID :-)

Henry


> 
> Thanks and regards,
> Dileepa
> 
> [1] http://www.wso2.com
> [2] http://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2012/sessions/building-server-platform-osgi 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 7:24 PM, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
> 
> On 28 Apr 2013, at 13:21, Dileepa Jayakody <dileepajayakody@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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 project which suits my research interests on semantic web.
>> 1. Using Semantic Concepts in Federated Social Web : STANBOL-1009
>> 2. Entity Disambiguation for Stanbol : STANBOL-1037
> 
> You, or others on this list, may also be interested in two other projects on LDP on the W3C site involving Scala:
> 
>    http://www.w3.org/2013/03/gsoc2013#ldp-rdf 
> 
> Google sponsors the student for $5000 [1]. 
> 
> The LDP project should be very interesting to any student who wants to be 
> at the leading edge of standards. What could it be used for? Simple: 
> to create a distributed secure Social Web. What is that? See my 
> talks on http://bblfish.net/ for more information. 
> 
> Alexandre Bertails, one of the mentors is at the W3C at MIT, and I am in Paris. 
> But we accept fluent Scala Devs from anywhere. ( I say fluent because there won't 
> be enough time to get going teaching you Scala). 
> 
>   If you are interested please contact us ASAP. The timeline is very short. The 
> deadline for student applications is May 3rd. 
> 
>  http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/events/google/gsoc2013 
> 
>> 
>> 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. 
> 
> yes. 
> 
>>  
>> Stanbol uses Apache 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 worked with the group two years ago on Clerezza, and the project then died as Reto the lead developer 
> went to study philosophy and work part time at Adobe. I really don't know how far it evolved since my last
> commit, that adapted I think a lot of clerezza to the latest ontology:
> 
>    https://github.com/bblfish/clerezza
> 
> I have been working on much leaner Scala libraries since then.
> 
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> The problem I had with the Clerezza developers is in how their framework made it difficult to find out 
> where information was coming from - and this is very important when you are dealing with trust. So you'd
> need to look into that with them  to see how their thinking has evolved.
> 
> 
>> 
>> Looking forward to your ideas.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Dileepa
> 
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
> 
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/