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Social Web
What’s Social Web
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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.
Two kinds
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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
Two Ways
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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.
Two concepts
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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.
Web 2.0
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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.
World Wide Web
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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.
Introduced In
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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 Inumbers (based on the OASIS XRI specifications),
Dataweb pages, and link contracts.
XRI
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XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier) is a new
URI-compatible scheme and resolution
protocol for abstract identifiers—identifiers
that are location-, application-, and transportindependent, 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.
XDI
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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.
I-numbers
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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.
I-names
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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 inumbers 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 inumber.
New NetWork Protocol
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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, humanfriendly way to indicate the global context of an iname or i-number. There are three primary types
of global context registries, each represented by a
single symbol as shown in the table below:
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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:
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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.
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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.
Dataweb pages
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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.
Dataweb pages
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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.
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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.
link contracts
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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.