There is a lot of focus in the DataPortability Project about making it easier to access user data. Another aspect to data portability, in general, is an analogous set of activities around enabling other data on the web to be more machine accessible. A few groups have been approaching this issue in various ways, many of whom work under the umbrella of the Semantic Web community. One subset of people focusing their efforts on this are taking what they call the Linked Data approach.
At a recent Cambridge SemWeb Gathering at MIT, Kingsley Idehen, CEO of OpenLink Software and a founder of the DBPedia project, had a great term for where he sees himself within the greater context of people working on these issues:
I like to say that I belong to the Semantic Web Community, but I’m a member of the Linked Data Tribe.
I found this concept of a tiered relationship and allegiance illuminating. Talking about it with him, he makes a distinction between the community as a whole and the fact that he focuses on a specific set of actionable efforts. It has been this sense of “what can be done right now” that has helped build upon what others are doing to move toward the goals of the community as a whole.
For example, I recently discussed how microformat markup could benefit the Semantic Web with Danny Ayers, an RDF/SemWeb guru working for Talis. Similarly, Ivan Herman gave a talk at the gathering about how to leverage RDFa within the context of an existing XHTML web page. Both examples are stepping stones in the direction of truly portable data on the web, and something that Kingsley considers the “data substrate” upon which Linked Data representations can be built.
To that end, I’m on a mini crusade to encourage developers to take the extra few minutes required to consider how their display layers can expose their content with effective markup. Rather than everyone having to learn OWL, RDF, and SPARQL before any progress can be made, there are some simple steps that will catalyze further steps. It’s really not that hard, and even if you’re not a developer you can mark up your own blogs and pages with microformats to provide search engines with much-needed context to describe your content.
To learn more:
NOTE: I’m purposefully not diving too deep here into the real “meat” of Linked Data. Instead, I hope you’ll spend a couple clicks checking out the simplicity of what can be done to help build the “data substrate”.
May 14th, 2008 | 
Attribute-Based Messaging and SemWeb Overlap
Sitting in a talk by Peter Neumann about “Identity and Trust in Context” at IDTrust 2009 he mentioned the use of attribute encryption within Attribute-Based Messaging (ABM). As I was unfamiliar with ABM, I found the following description from the paper “Using Attribute-Based Access Control to Enable Attribute-Based Messaging” by Rakesh Bobba, Omid Fatemieh, Fariba Khan, Carl A. Gunter, and Himanshu Khurana.:
Basically, what this means is that a user wanting to send a message to unknown recipients would run a query against a system so it was only sent to people who match the selected attributes. For example, I could use an ABM solution to send a survey of IETF participation to colleagues who are members of at least three IETF discussion lists.
I immediately thought that this is the type of solution that fits squarely in the sweet spot of the Semantic Web. I could easily see that if the attributes are encoded using RDF, an ABM system would seem to be an excellent use case leveraging SPARQL. Looking around, though, I can’t find anyone working on this approach.
Does anyone have any examples of or suggestions for this idea in practice?