- From: Harry Halpin <hhalpin@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2011 16:04:12 -0000 (GMT)
- To: public-xg-federatedsocialweb@w3.org
Hi,
I'm Harry Halpin, and am right now working for the W3C part-time in the
Technology & Society Domain on our new identity and community group
efforts. As part of that effort, I'm investigating how we can get W3.org
to upgrade our infrastructure to be more social, in particular looking
at things like BuddyPress and Status.Net.
My overall goal would be to see a few different code-bases, both
open-source and by enterprise/vendors, deploy a common set of test-cases
that we can easily develop here. The idea is then that we can guarantee
developers can implement these test-cases without fear of patents and
then users can check to make sure their favorite social sites can all
communicate, preserve their privacy, and allow their data to be portable.
On a personal note, I spent most of January in North Africa (sorry about
lack of email), and was amazed at the power of social media. I firmly
believe that current events show more than ever a federated social web is
needed. I have spent a lot of time in the W3C, chairing groups like the
Social Web XG (see our report on social networking for the w3c for our
vision and a pretty nice overview of the space, although you all probably
know it all [1]!) and thought with Evan that the W3C might be able to help
out this effort.
With the rest of my time, I'm a visiting scientist at Yahoo! Research
Barcelona on searching through structured data with Yahoo!, mostly on
this new competition [2]. Before this, I got my Ph.D. in Informatics in
Edinburgh, focussed on topics like tagging, search, philosophy, and
'social' semantics.
cheers,
harry
[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/XGR-socialweb-20101206/
[2] http://semsearch.yahoo.com/
Received on Tuesday, 8 March 2011 16:04:14 UTC