Social Web

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The Social Web refers to an open global distributed data sharing network similar to today's World Wide Web, except instead of linking documents, the Social Web will link people, organizations, and concepts.

The term was introduced in a July 2004 paper called "The Social Web: Building an Open Social Network with XDI" published in the PlaNetwork Journal by members of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee. This paper owes much to the Augmented Social Network paper published for the PlaNetwork conference the previous year.

The Social Web paper explains how the introduction of a new protocol for distributed mediated data sharing and synchronization, XDI, could enable a new layer of trusted data interchange applications. The key building blocks for this layer are I-names and I-numbers (based on the OASIS XRI specifications), Dataweb pages, and link contracts.

Perhaps the best analogy for the Social Web is the worldwide banking and credit card system. This infrastructure has evolved over centuries to facilitate the global exchange of a very sensitive form of data — money — by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — banks. The Social Web takes the same approach for exchange of private, sensitive information by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — i-brokers.

The Universalization of the Virtual Identity Virtual Rights, a new Legal Entity: the Virtual Identity, and a new Fundamental Right: Not to have or have a Virtual Identity are also closely related to the Social Web.

In 1998 the term "Social Web" was introduced in an article by Peter Hoschka in a related context to describe the shift from using computers and the web as simple cooperation tools to using the computer as a social medium: From Basic Groupware to the Social Web

In 1955 the term "Social Web" was introduced by Author C. Krey in the essay collection History and the Social Web published by the University of Minnesota press.

[edit] See also

• Dataweb
• I-broker
• I-name
• I-number
• XRI
• XDI
• Andy Dale's blog about XRI, XDI and Identity

[edit] External links

• The Future of Social Networks
• The Social Web: Building an Open Social Network with XDI
• The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next-Generation Internet
• OASIS XDI Technical Committee
• OASIS XRI Technical Committee
• XDI.ORG
• Identity Commons
• Virtual Rights
• How does online networking work?