Social Web

1. Social Web

2. What’s Social Web • The Social Web(社会性互联网 ) is currently used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the World Wide Web.

3. Two kinds • The first kind of socializing is typified by "people focus" websites such as Bebo, Facebook, and Myspace and Xiaonei. • The second kind of socializing is typified by a sort of "hobby focus" websites. such as Flickr, Kodak Gallery and Photobucket

4. Two Ways • The most general and most common type is always at a distance and only on the World Wide Web. • However, where Flickr members come from a common local geographical area, then they are inclined to get together physically for a common photoshoot. • This exemplifies the second type of socializing through the World Wide Web: that which leads to real physical contact.

5. Two concepts • The Social Web may also be used to refer to two different, yet related concepts. The first is as a description of web 2.0 technologies that are focused on social interaction and community before anything else. • The second is a proposal for a future network similar to the World Wide Web.

6. Web 2.0 Since social web applications are built to encourage communication between people, they typically emphasize some combination of the following social attributes: • Identity: who are you? • Reputation: what do people think you stand for? • Presence: where are you? • Relationships: who are you connected with? who do you trust? • Groups: how do you organize your connections? • Conversations: what do you discuss with others? • Sharing: what content do you make available for others to interact with? • Examples of social applications include Twitter, Facebook, Stumpedia, and Jaiku.

7. World Wide Web • The first is an open global distributed data sharing network similar to today's World Wide Web, except instead of linking documents, the Social Web will link people, organizations, and concepts.

8. Introduced In • The use of the term in this context was introduced in a July 2004 paper called "The Social Web: Building an Open Social Network with XDI". • The paper explains how the introduction of a new protocol for distributed mediated data sharing and synchronization, XDI, could enable a new layer of trusted data interchange applications. The key building blocks for this layer are I-names and I-numbers (based on the OASIS XRI specifications), Dataweb pages, and link contracts.

9. XRI • XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier) is a new URI-compatible scheme and resolution protocol for abstract identifiers—identifiers that are location-, application-, and transport-independent, and thus can be shared across any number of domains and directories. • The XRI 1.0 specifications were published in January 2004 by the OASIS XRI Technical Committee, which is currently working on version 1.1.

10. XDI • XDI (XRI Data Interchange) is a new Web service for generalized distributed data sharing and mediation using XRIs. The XDI protocol is being developed by the OASIS XDI Technical Committee. • The goal of XDI is to create a universal data interchange format in which XML data from any data source can be identified, exchanged, linked, and synchronized into a machine-readable "dataweb" just as HTML pages from any content source are linked into the human-readable Web today. • What makes this universal interchange format possible is identifying, describing, and versioning data using XRIs.

11. I-numbers • I-numbers—machine-friendly identifiers (similar to IP addresses) that are registered to a resource (person, organization, application, file, digital object, etc.) and never reassigned. • This means they can always be used to address a network representation of the resource as long it remains available somewhere on the network. • I-numbers are designed to be very efficient for network routers to process and resolve.

12. I-names • I-names—human-friendly identifiers that in most cases will resolve to an i-number, making them much easier for people to use. • Though typically long-lived, i-names differ from i-numbers in one critical way: they may be transferred or reassigned to another resource by their owner. • For example, a company that changes its corporate name could sell its old i-name to another company, while both companies could retain their original i-number.

13. New NetWork Protocol

14. Non-hierarchical peer-to-peer addressing—a way any two network nodes can assign each other XRIs and perform cross-resolution. • Cross-references—the ability for an XRI to contain another XRI, enabling the same logical resource to be identified in different contexts (a feature particularly relevant to cross-domain data sharing) • Global context registries—a simple, human-friendly way to indicate the global context of an i-name or i-number. There are three primary types of global context registries, each represented by a single symbol as shown in the table below:

16. I-names in particular are referred to as universal private addresses because they solve two other longstanding problems of conventional addresses like phone numbers or email addresses:

17. Unified addressing. Because an i-name is abstract, it is the first true “one-line business card.” Given the proper permissions (see below), it can be used to automatically look up (resolve) any other contact data necessary to communicate with its owner. There is no limit to the type of data that can be resolved by an i-name.

19. Privacy control. An i-name is literally “unspammable” because it is not an email address (or a phone number, or a fax number, or any other form of direct communications channel.) • Instead the owner of an i-name controls how it is resolved, and what privacy rules must be observed before any contact can be made or data accessed. • This enables new personal contact pages that can automatically filter contact requests, stopping spam before it starts.

20. Dataweb pages • The second key building block of XDI is a solution to the complex problem of exchanging data across different domains. • The Web solved this problem by establishing one standard markup language for all Web documents—HTML.

21. Dataweb pages • The Social Web applies the same approach using XML, the rapidly growing universal language for data representation. • XDI defines an extremely simple, interoperable XML schema (technically called a metaschema) in which every element of data is identified with one or more XRIs. • XML documents in this format are called Dataweb pages because they can be linked together in a manner very similar to the Web.

22. The power of this approach is that Dataweb pages provide a single format in which any XML-encoded data (including XML documents in other schema formats) can be shared independent of the application or domain from which they originated. Additionally, using Dataweb link contracts (see below). • these pages can be persistently linked and synchronized, and every page can show the precise chain-of-authority for every item of data on it, whether it is an original or a copy, and whether it belongs in the personal, organizational, or public domain of authority.

23. link contracts • Just as the World Wide Web protocols allow any two Web pages anywhere on the Internet to be linked, XDI allows any two Dataweb pages to be linked. • The difference is the power of the links. Web links are essentially one-way “strings” that allow a linked document to be downloaded (“pulled”) into a browser. • Dataweb links are two-way “pipes” through which data can actively flow in either direction (“push” or “pull”). This flow can be controlled automatically by “valves” on either end called XDI link contracts.