To see a world in a grain of sand,
        And a heaven in a wild flower,
        Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
        And eternity in an hour.
        The problem is that everything is linked to everything else. So if  
you want to move the whole graph from one place to another, you may  
end up moving all the data on that site. Since we are all related by 6  
degrees of separation, moving my friends and their friends and their  
friends would require moving all the data on one service to another.  
Go a little further and you'd end up having to move all the  
information on the internet. So we have a reductio ad absurdum. The  
conclusion is impossible, so the antecedents are not compatible.
        I can imagine someone arguing that the solution is simply to reduce  
the ambition. We only want some small part of the data to be ported.  
If we limit ourselves won't that do? Yes, but it won't give you what  
you want. If you go to a new service and create an account there, and  
then move over a graph of your friends, the information about your  
friends that you have moved over to the new system will not be up to  
date, unless your friends move over too. But your friends can't be  
maintaining an account for you because you want your data to be  
portable. Just think of it. If 10 of my friends move their data, then  
I could end up with 10 accounts to maintain. Again we are led to an  
absurd situation.
So no: the only solution is linked data. URLs to identify people, so  
that I can move my data to a new service and still point to the URLs  
of all my friends. If I move, no need for anyone else to move.
        Henry

I have no problem imagining going to a site, signing up, and then saying
(hopefully automatically) my lists of friends is over there, read it,
find people who are already members here and make them friends. Because
this is what we already do with the very common "import my contacts from
gmail" function that almost every social site now does. The current
process is horrible, inaccurate, insecure and demands too much manual
intervention. But these are all relatively small problems that we can
fix.

There are some big wins to be had in DP without demanding that every
site completely re-architects and re-codes around a "better" way of
doing things.

Julian, there is very little infrastructure needed to publish a foaf  
file.
And one does not even need every site to do so. Those that do will be  
a lot nicer to work with though.

Henry

On 15 Feb 2008, at 19:59, Julian Bond wrote:

I am glad to know that I am not the only one that has recently blogged
about this, I recently made this post:
http://vanirsystems.com/danielsblog/2008/02/14/my-view-of-dataportabi...

I completely agree, a valid URI is one of the most perfect ways to
identify a person. A person being an object, and an object typically
has an ID to refer to, of which would be an OID in an Object Oriented
DataBase or a URI on a web system.

Using a URI one would be able to say "hey I am this person with URI
http://x.y.z/user/JoeBlogs" and thats where (for example) their
profile, contact and friends info resides.... and the most important
thing here though as that the information at that URI should be the
reference for information and not the source of information to copy/
paste. This is true data portability based on interlinked data.

Daniel

--
Daniel Lewis
* Technology Evangelist for OpenLink Software ( http://www.openlinksw.com/
)
* Personal Blog: http://vanirsystems.com/danielsblog/

On Feb 15, 8:35 pm, Henry Story <henry.st...@gmail.com> wrote:

-- Christian

--
taotaka...@gmail.com
Blog: http://mrtopf.de
Planet: http://worldofsl.com

RL: Christian Scholz, mrt...@gmail.com
http://mrtopf.de

I think you set the bar pretty high now - I wonder if anyone can match
it!

Chris

On Feb 16, 2:28 am, "marc canter" <m...@broadbandmechanics.com> wrote:

What I am against is building a social network or site with SN features
where profile and social graph information is not stored locally but
assembled on the fly at run time from external sources. Because you'll
never get from here to there with existing sites. Because we're not yet
at the stage where site and net performance would support this. And
because there are some query routes that simply can't be done without
local aggregation.

 >So no: the only solution is linked data. URLs to identify people, so
 >that I can move my data to a new service and still point to the URLs of
 >all my friends.

This would be a nice feature as a secondary profile page. We're
beginning to see sites build in a YASN-Roll pointing to profiles for
that person on other sites. There's another possibility here which is a
Contact-Roll page that's a local aggregation of all the FOAF for that
person. Perhaps that's what you're talking about. But there's a
difference between the contact list for people on that site and the sum
of the contact lists from other sites. And quite the implementation
problem.