rawjeev's randoms

The Pull Model

dagoneye:

A pump pushing sewage at you is a good metaphor for what’s wrong with the marketplace we’ve constructed in the late 20th century. Doc has built the VRM project as a means of exploring better ways of building markets for the 21st century. Something I hadn’t considered until I was going through David Siegel’s book Pull is that “pull” is the right metaphor for this new marketplace and it’s precisely why Doc’s metaphor of a sewage pump rings so true. David’s book is about the Semantic Web and the use of data standards to enable you to “pull” the information, services, and products to you. An example from the book that really hit home for me is this: in 2010 if you order a package from Amazon, you have to give an address where it will be delivered. Wouldn’t it be better if instead, you just gave Amazon an identifier and then the package would find you at the place you wanted it to go–even if that’s the hotel you’re currently staying at? In essence, you pull the package to you with online data. This isn’t a pipe dream, but a perfectly reasonable way to think about how the world ought to work–and one that’s doable now from a technical standpoint. Doc uses different language to describe this same idea when he talks demand leading supply. The pump is all about supply leading demand. The key idea that both Doc and David would agree on here is that “If demand leads supply…, customers need to be the points of integration for their own data.”

— Xml для SEO » Building Fourth Party Apps with Kynetx

Towards a Decentralized, Non-Propritery Social-Network

• Imagine a world where you just need to maintain one online profile and the same profile information is valid on Face-book, Orkut, LinkedIn, your blog or any other site on the Internet.

• Imagine you don’t need to befriend your friends time and again on each social networking site.

• Imagine you have access to a Social-Graph irrespective of where the nodes may be; some friends from Face-book, some from Orkut, and some are independently hosting their profiles on their websites.

Hard? It Shouldn’t be.

• We have a universal mail-address (one can send a mail from Gmail to a Yahoo Id without a problem).

• Open-Id has given us a mechanism to use a single user-id & password for use across multiple sites.

• And Now FOAF has the potential to do that to social graphs.

I do not wish to discuss FOAF in detail here because, there is already enough about FOAF available out there (see: links at the end).

Very briefly however, FOAF is a vocabulary that can be used for describing people and their relationships. You can create an FOAF Profile in XML format in which you can describe yourself and also point to profiles of your friends.

Here is my FOAF profile visualized:

In the visualization above you can see people I know (under the “Knows” heading). The last person in the list, libby, is a link and it leads to Libby Miller’s FOAF profile. Interesting isn’t it?

Some creases that need to be Ironed out w.r.t FOAF:

• Trust: How can you trust that the FOAF profile shown above really belongs to me?

• Privacy: How can I make some sensitive information in my foaf-profile like Date-of-Birth, email-address etc accessible only to people I trust? (I have SHA-1 encrypted some sensitive information in my profile but, that’s not a solution)

• How can my FOAF profile become my universal Profile?

People are suggesting ways to solve problems. There are already some proposals to solve the issue of trust (see PGP Signing FOAF-Profiles),

I hope to see some discussion on the Privacy of FOAF profile information, I wonder if there is some value in bringing Open-Id and FOAF closer.

With the right questions getting asked and answered, I don’t see why an FOAF-profile cant become a universal profile on the Internet.

Some Resources:

1. FOAF - Building Networks with a Friend of a Friend
2. PGP Signing FOAF Files
3. Fun with FOAF
4. FOAF Visualization
5. Some FOAF tools
6. The FOAF Vocabulary
7. FOAF + SSL

Web & Semantic Web

The Web (World Wide Web)

• The World Wide Web  is a web of documents; A global repository of linked documents (with HTML hyper-links acting as the glue).
• Documents that are well presented for humans to glean information from.
• One can navigate the web, hopping from one document to another transparently irrespective of which computer the documents are stored on.
• Web is a realization of “It isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting”.
• The World Wide Web is Document centric.

The Semantic Web

• The Semantic Web is a web of data; A Web scale database (RDF defining the structure of data)
• Data that is structured enough  to be processed by machines/software-agents (which in-turn may provide information of better quality for human consumption)
• Graphs of data which can be processed to infer non explicit knowledge.
• Semantic Web is a realization of “It isn’t the Documents but the things they are about that are interesting”
• The Semantic web is Data centric.

Semantic Web Notes

• RDF is intended to provide a simple way to make statements
  about Web resources.


• In RDF information is simply a collection of statements.


• A statement is a Triple (the base element of the RDF model).


• In a triple, a resource (the subject) is linked to another resource (the object) through an arc labelled with a third resource (the predicate).


• We may say that (subject) has a property (predicate) valued by (object).


• A triple can be viewed as a labelled edge in a graph.


• All the triples result in a direct graph, whose nodes and arcs are labelled (if labelled) with qualified URIs. Exception is objects (targets of the graph) can be literals.


• In the semantic web it’s best to think in terms of graphs (not XML or Documents).

• network-accessible things, such as an electronic document, an image, a service (e.g., “today’s weather report for Los Angeles”), or a group of other resources.
• things that are not network-accessible, such as human beings, corporations, and bound books in a library.
• abstract concepts that do not physically exist, such as the concept of a “creator” or the number 1.