Community Equity, SunSpace, FOAF+SSL, & KiWi

If you are following open source developments related to social networks, communities, and/or the semantic web, these three efforts (Community Equity, FOAF+SSL, and Kiwi) should be of interest:

CommunityEquity

Community Equity Open Source Milestone 1.1 released http://digg.com/u17asN

6:10 PM Jul 8th from twhirl

Community Equity (CommunityEquity) on Twitter

SunSpace Use Case

The second half of Friday was dedicated to discussing the Sun Use Case, and the technologies and services we would need to integrate there to support the already existing SunSpace intranet. We agreed that it was unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that Sun would replace the existing Confluence installation in favor of KiWi, because the aim of KiWi cannot be to create yet another Wiki engine that competes with what is already there. Instead, in the SunSpace use case, the KiWi system will be more like an intelligent index that integrates content and data from already existing sources and offers additional value in the form of advanced services (e.g. search, tagging, …) and widgets that can be included on the user interface level (e.g. recommendations, tagging, metadata, …). The data integration will make use of existing technologies like Linked (Open) Data. We decided that we would contribute particularly to the update mechanism of Linked Data since this seems to be an issue that is yet not resolved.

A second major point of discussion was the integration of Sun’s Community Equity (CE) with KiWi. We decided that we would head for a rather tight integration at the EJB level rather than at the Web Service level, because then we will be able to use CE more easily for e.g. recommendation and search. This integration will take place until end of August.

Finally, we briefly discussed single sign on for KiWi and correspondingly, Henry’s suggestion for FOAF+SSL, which Steffi has already mostly implemented in KiWi. Also, an issue still to be solved for the SunSpace Use Case is how to handle permission management in KiWi.

We closed the meeting on Friday afternoon. Most said it was the most productive KiWi meeting we had yet and that we have moved much forward. I just hope that we can also hold the pace.:-)

Note: I will upload figures and pictures as soon as I have them.

Sebastian Schaffert » KiWi July Meeting in Prague: Towards Integration

FOAF+SSL

FOAF+SSL is a authentication and authorization protocol that links a Web ID to a public key, thereby enabling a global, decentralized/distributed, and open yet secure social network. It functions with existing browsers.

It uses PKI standards — usually thought of as hierarchical trust management tools — in a decentralized "web of trust" way. The web of trust is built using semantic web vocabularies (particularly FOAF) published in RESTful manner to form Linked Data.

Based on well known and widely deployed standards, FOAF+SSL and its implications is being discussed on the FOAF protocols mailing list. Other implementations of this conceptual protocol will probably retain SSL in the mix, but FOAF may be replaced by any of several other vocabularies.

For the most recent description of the protocol, read the one-page FOAF+SSL: Adding Security to Open Distributed Social Networks. If you feel there is something odd going on, your suspicion will be confirmed on reading The FOAF+SSL Paradigm Shift, which should also help you align your intuitions better. For a much more detailed, technical explanation of the way we are thinking of trust, see FOAF+SSL: Creating a Web of Trust without Key Signing Parties.

foaf+ssl - ESW Wiki

KiWi - Knowledge In A Wiki - About

KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki is an EU-funded project (No 211932) combining the wiki philosophy with methods of the Semantic Web, aiming to develop a new approach to knowledge management.

The main outcomes of the project will be

1. an enhanced wiki vision (the "KiWi vision") describing how the "convention over configuration" paradigm of wikis combined with semantic technologies can lead to flexible and problem-oriented knowledgemanagement,
2. a collaborative, web-based environment (the "KiWi system") that provides support for knowledge sharing, knowledge creation, and coordination in software and project knowledge management,
3. the evaluation of this system in two concrete, representative use cases at our industry partners,
4. the "KIWI handbook", describing the project vision, the KiWi system functionalities, as well as giving recommendations and best practices for using the system in concrete knowledge management scenarios.

The KIWI consortium brings together leading research groups (Salzburg Research, Aalborg University, Brno University of Technology, LMU Munich) in the areas of semantic wikis, reasoning, information extraction, personalisation, and knowledge management for software processes. These are matched by two large international corporations in knowledge intensive areas (Sun Microsystems and Logica) that offer use cases demonstrating a clear need for the advanced knowledge management we envision in the project, and by a SME (Semantic Web Company) specialised in the dissemination of semantic technologies to the industry.

Detailed information about the consortium is available in the Partners section.

KiWi - Knowledge In A Wiki - About