Re: [Social-discuss] Which of four projects are we doing?

[Story Henry]

On 27 Mar 2010, at 18:07, Carlo von Loesch wrote:

> Er, sorry.. to me web of trust is always linked profoundly to privacy -
> if it's a public trust network that anyone can see I am actually scared
> by its existence. I don't want the world to know who I trust and who
> trusts me.
> 
> The logical consequence of this is foaf+SSL, but in order to really
> connect the information from the foaf profiles with the choice of SSL
> certificates you need some server-side intelligence. Right? That to me
> is the point where you leave the battleground of traditional web
> servers. A web server that parses and understands FOAF goes beyond the
> web. Maybe I'm old-fashioned and should update my views there.   :)
> 
> Okay, so I correct myself and say with foaf+SSL we might very well
> have privacy and a web of trust.

:-) Nice somersault!

Your reasoning above is a good summary of how foaf+ssl came about. 

> Still, what it enables us to do is to use a web browser to see profiles.

Or any agent acting on your behalf. It would be easy for us to create a
relation relating a Person to some Robot. We could then add something like 

<me> extendedBy <r1> .

<r1> a Robot;
    is cert:identity of [ a rsa:RSAPublicKey; .... ]

So we can even give robots public private key pairs. If we think of a
web server as a robot, then we can be related to our web server bot in 
our foaf profile. Our Web Server bot does not care about web interfaces 
that much. He just likes data. So he consumes data and works on our behalf 
while we are doing other things,... collecting friend messages, sending 
updates to our followers, serving pages,....

> It [foaf+ssl?] wouldn't push notifications of status updates and profile 
> changes to us.

That should be quite possible. Let us imagine we have a relationship
to relate a Person and a status notification endpoint. Something like

:me statusNotificationsGo </status/new/> .

So all my friends or people I subscribe to would know from my profile
where to send me updates. A bit like the inverse of Atom/rss in a way, 
where we are constantly polling in a web browser. Here web servers could
update each other. Using foaf+ssl means the web server would know at least
who was connecting to reduce spam attacks.

So I think it could be very simple to do both polling and push really using 
HTTP and a bit of semantics.

Henry

PS. Note that the Semantic Web is designed at a level of abstraction 
which does not require HTTP at all: ftp, ftps, file urls also work. 
There is no reason other protocols can't be tied in, and no reason why
one cannot have data that is cross protocol: not all data needs to be
http data. This makes perfect sense:

<http://bblfish.net/#hjs> foaf:knows <ftps://george.name/#me> .

But since everyon should know HTTP and there are libs everywhere for it, it 
is easiest to start research there.