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Networking ecosystem. We need a framework to
univocally identify a person or other entities on the
Web such as companies, organizations, web sites,
contents or devices.
Whichever content these entities may publish on
the Web their unique ID should serve to identify
them as owners. Most importantly entities may
reference each others, declare social relationships,
let others access and consume contents also if their
profile is not hosted on the same Web server.
Whatever you publish on the Web should be
reconciled to your profile and accessible, without the
need of creating and replicating profiles into
different silos.
The game is quite simple, you identify yourself
with a URL then you provide a document describing
yourself, your social relationships and available
resources at that URL. A certificate based
architecture and procedure can then easily support
authentication and enable access control list in a
browser friendly, encrypted way.
Internet users should be able to store and publish
on the Web, on their mobile or home server and
grant access to a list of other entities still being in
full control of their data and tracing requests.
Telecom Italia is contributing for this to become
a standard as this would be the only way to collect
requirements from heterogeneous domains prevent
fragmentation and encouraging adoption.
WebID is already an unofficial submission to
W3C, it basically aims at using X.509 certificates to
associate a User Agent (Browser) to a Person
identified via a URL. Telecom Italia is kicking off
the W3C WebID incubator group (W3C Web
Identity IG Charter, 2010) together with Apache
Software foundation, Nokia and DERI. This
initiative aims to pave the road for standardizing the
WebID protocol by bringing together people
involved in authorisation and authentication
activities, building on the existing WebID initiative.
2.2 Distributed Social Contents
and Services
In response to increasingly powerful handheld
devices, people are constantly populating the Web of
new contents. We define as content whatever can be
read/written on the Internet ranging from Web
pages, Live Audio/Video Streams profile
information and so on.
As said the current practice pretends to force
people to apply to different vertical silos to reach
different audiences and this is extremely unpractical
for managing one’s information on the Web and for-
ces to waive data ownership.
The content sharing framework we foresee
would not mandate to publish information into the
same Web site but would let everyone choose where
to store them just providing the mechanisms to
reconcile to the owner identity.
In Telecom Italia we prototyped a Social context
aware platform which can be instructed by users to
seamlessly collect and correlate information, e.g.
generating a geo referenced picture album, or an
automatic daily blog to share with friends or
acquaintances. This kind of information can be very
privacy sensitive and would be unfeasible to store it
constantly to an online social network, the average
user would probably like to collect it into an home
server for personal recordings and possibly share
with very close friends.
The content storing/publication phase has to be
structured in a way to easy the look up phase. Some
of the contents (e.g. pictures) may span over
different devices (e.g. Home Server, Mobile, third
party Web site) but we expect the retrieval phase to
be agnostic of the data store. With this specific
respect we foresee the need of (standardizing) a
minimal semantics (e.g. taxonomy) and a user
friendly mechanisms (e.g. tags) to properly
categorize contents in the act of publishing.
Contents (e.g. photo, video etc) will include
further information in form of attributes (e.g.
picture, date, caption, context etc).
W3C is already providing standard mechanisms
such as RDFa (W3C RDFa Primer) to nest this kind
of information within standard HTML page for use
of semantic crawlers.
Merging Web Identity and Semantic
categorization of contents, would consent to create
effective views of one’s multimedia contents stored
into different devices or web sites (accessible by
means of references to the actual hosting devices)
and to share them without the need of passing those
to third parties. Even if contents may reside on
different devices, if they are organized by some
semantic criterion, performing an integrated view
would be an easy task.
Nevertheless we believe that electing some of
them as the master storage would make sense and
that a home server (e.g. Network Accessible
Storage) would meet the requirements in terms of
storage capabilities, processing power, continuous
Internet connectivity and low power consumption.
Depending on the type of contents published
(e.g. video) and number of concurrent requests
(number of interacting friends) this may be the
preferred option.
AUGMENT OPEN AND DISTRIBUTED SOCIAL NETWORKING WITH CONTEXT AWARENESS
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