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“Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF” - XTech 2008 - Friday, May 9 at 9:00

XTech 2008 conference will te taking place in Dublin, Ireland next week (May 6-9, 2008). This XTech talk will describe how to combine lightweight Semantic Web vocabularies - SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) and FOAF (Friend of a Friend) - to enable data portability between social media sites.

In order to let users become owners of their own data hosted on multiple sites, portability between social media sites is required in terms of both (1) the personal profiles and friend networks and (2) a user’s content objects expressed on each site.

The Data Portability initiative, which outlines the main priciples behind such portability, lists RDF as one of the open standards that can be used for porting users’ data and social networks. But this is a very general claim since RDF is a flexible, low-level data format that can express almost anything and you still need to choose [a small number of] vocabularies that can describe the domain you are interested in. This is where SIOC and FOAF come into play:

• The FOAF vocabulary allows us to represent people and their social networks, providing the social network component of data portability. It can be used in a combination with the the OpenID identity system.
• The SIOC vocabulary is an open format for expressing information about user-generated content in an interoperable way. It provides the content object component of data portability. The SIOC Types module can be used to further specify different types of Social Web / Web2.0 objects that we may want to describe.

As an experiment you can try importing data created by one of SIOC export plugins (look at a list of over 45 SIOC-enabled applications to see what tools are available for your social media platform) with the SIOC import plugin for WordPress. In order to make it more interesting use a social media site other than WordPress as a source of SIOC data. See you at XTech!

More information:

• XTech 2008 - Dublin, Ireland - May 6-9, 2008 (registration still open)
• Data Portability initiative
• Great videos: John Breslin on Data Portability and “Get Your Data Out” song by Danny Ayers