Re: .htaccess a major bottleneck to Semantic Web adoption / Was: Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

Dan Brickley wrote:
> +cc: Norm Walsh
>
> On 25/6/09 19:39, Juan Sequeda wrote:
>> So... then from what I understand.. why bother with content negotiation,
>> right?
>>
>> Just do everything in RDFa, right?
>>
>> We are planning to deploy soon the linked data version of Turn2Live.com.
>> And we are in the discussion of doing the content negotiation (a la
>> BBC). But if we can KISS, then all we should do is RDFa, right?
>
> Does every major RDF toolkit have an integrated RDFa parser already?
>
> And yep the conneg idiom isn't mandatory. You can use # URIs, at least 
> if the .rdf application/rdf+xml mime type is set. I believe that's in 
> the Apache defaults now. At least checking here, a fresh Ubuntu 
> installation has "application/rdf+xml                             rdf" 
> in /etc/mime.types (a file which I think comes via Apache but not 100% 
> sure).
>
> But yes - this is a major problem and headache. Not just around the 
> conneg piece, but in general. I've seen similar results to those 
> reported here with "write yourself a FOAF file" exercises. Even if 
> people use Leigh Dodd's handy foaf-a-matic webforms to author a file 
> ... at the end of the session they are left with a piece of RDF/XML in 
> their hands, and an instruction to "upload it to their sites". Even 
> people with blogs and facebook profiles and twitter accounts etc. can 
> find this daunting. And not many people know what FTP is (or was).
>
> My suggestion here is that we look into something like OAuth for 
> delegating permission tokens for uploading files. OAuth is a protocol 
> that uses a Web/HTML for site A to request that some user of site B 
> allow it to perform certain constrained tasks on site B. Canonical 
> example being "site A (a printing company) wants to see non-public 
> photos on site B (a photo-sharing site)". I believe this model works 
> well for writing/publishing, as well as for mediating information access.
>
> If site A is an RDF-generating site, and site B is a generic hosting 
> site, then the idea is that we write or find a generic OAuth-enabled 
> utility that B could use, such that the users of site B could give 
> sites like A permission to publish documents automatically. At a 
> protocol level, I would expect this to use AtomPub but it could also 
> be WebDAV or another mechanism.
>
> But how to get all those sites to implement such a thing? Well 
> firstly, this isn't limited to FOAF. Or to any flavour of RDF. I think 
> there is a strong story for why this will happen eventually. Strong 
> because there are clear benefits for many of the actors:
>
> * a data-portability and user control story: I don't want all my music 
> profile info to be on last.fm; I want last.fm to maintain 
> http://danbri.org/music for me.
> * a benefits-the-data source story: I'm sure the marketing teams of 
> various startups would be very happy at the ability to directly push 
> content into 1000s of end-user sites. For the Google/Link karma, 
> traffic etc.
> * benefits the hosts story: rather than having users share their FTP 
> passwords, they share task-specific tokens that can be managed and 
> rolled back on finer-grained basis
>
> So a sample flow might be:
>
> 1. User Alice is logged into her blog, which is now AtomPub+OAuth 
> enabled.
> 2. She clicks on a link somewhere for "generate a FOAF file from your 
> music interests", which takes her to a site that asks some basic 
> information (name, homepage) and about some music-related sites she uses.
> 3. That site's FOAF generator site scans her public last.fm profile 
> (after asking her username), and then does the same for her Myspace 
> and YouTube profiles.
> 4. It then says "OK, generated music profile! May we publish this to 
> your site? It then scans her homesite, blog etc via some 
> auto-discovery protocol(s), to see which of them have a writable 
> AtomPub + OAuth endpoint. It finds her wordpress blog supports this.
> 5. Alice is bounced to an OAuth permissioning page on her blog, which 
> says something like:
>     "The Music Profile site at example.com  would like to
>     have read and write permission for an area of your site: 
> once/always/never or for 6 months?"
> 6. Alice gives permission for 6 months. Some computer stuff happens in 
> the background, and the Music site is given a token it can use to post 
> data to Alice's site.
> 7. http://alice.example.com/blog/musicprofile then becomes a page (or 
> mini-blog or activity stream) maintained entirely, or partially, by 
> the remote site using RDFa markup sent as AtomPub blog entries, or 
> maybe as AtomPub attachments.
>
> OK I'm glossing over some details here, such as configuration, choice 
> of URIs etc. I may be over-simplifying some OAuth aspects, and 
> forgetting detail of what's possible. But I think there is real 
> potential in this sort of model, and would like a sanity check on that!
>
> Also the detail of whether different sites could/would write to the 
> same space or feed or not. And how we can use this as a 
> page-publishing model instead of a blog entry publishing model.
>
> I've written about this before, see 
> http://markmail.org/message/gplslpe2k2zjuliq
>
> Re prototyping ...
>
> There is some wordpress+atompub code around, see 
> http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:KcriYA9UohcJ:singpolyma.net/2008/05/atompub-oauth-for-wordpress/+wordpress+oauth&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=firefox-a 
>
>
> Also I just found 
> http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/oauth_for_roller
>
> And in http://danbri.org/words/2008/10/15/380 there is a point to some 
> Google announcements from last year.
>
>
> I hope someone on these lists will find the OAuth/AtomPub combination 
> interesting enough to explore (and report back on). I've also Cc:'d 
> Norm Walsh here who knows AtomPub inside out now.
>
> Is this making sense to anyone but me? :)
>

Dan,

It has always made sense to me. I call what you describe a Data Space 
(others also use the term: Dataspace) :-)

A Data Space is limited to one activity of the artifacts resulting from 
said activity.  You should be able to put Blogs, Wikiwords, Photos, 
Feeds, Calendars, Address-Books etc. in to a Data Space. You should also 
be able generate conversation around any item of data that exists in a 
Data Space (multi-dimensional objects of sociality etc..).

A Data Space would support a plethora of protocols (including OAuth, 
FOAF+SSL, OpenID, AtomPub, and others).

OpenLink Data Spaces [1]  has always been about all of the above and 
some :-)

Links:

1. http://tr.im/pQuJ - An old ODS presentation (Slidy + RDFa based)
2. http://ods.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/ODS - Home Page
3. http://ods.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/ODS/VirtOAuthControllers 
- OAuth support in ODS


Kingsley
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>


-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Friday, 26 June 2009 12:02:14 UTC