Posted December 10th, 2007, in: Semantic Web| Technology

Thought I’d do a little post about the project I’ve been trying to make grow for a while.

The Problem:

• Mainstream-quality web services/applications that leverage the “Semantic Web” will not begin to be built en masse, until there is a large enough Semantic Web (containing enough useful Data) to make it clear to enterprise that there is value in innovating such services/applications. In other words, to the developers of Right Now, there is not sufficient value in the Semantic Web to make it adoptable. It just isn’t widespread enough.

• From the perspective of the average participant of the Web, there is no incentive to publish data in the Standard formats that make a Web Of Data possible (and in turn the Next Gen Apps we’ll see when there is a Web Of Data sufficient to fuel that innovation). In other words, to the citizens of the Web Right Now, there is not sufficient value in the Semantic Web to make it worth contributing to.

Some Bullet Points

• Social Data is very valuable to ordinary people (see ‘web 2.0′ and just about everything cool on the Web right now)
• Social Data is very valuable to many kinds of businesses (see every registration form you’ve ever filled out and of course advertising and marketing)
• Regular Web Users are willing to publish their Social information to the Web, if it provides value for them to do so.

My idea:

More Bullets

• Create value for normal Web Users in publishing their social data to the Semantic Web.
• Inject Social Data into the Semantic Web.

Idea Summary

• Allow mixing of Social Data from numerous platforms like Semantic Web Standards, common Excel & CSV formats, Microformats Embedded in HTML pages or via file upload (XFN, vCard, hCard), Mail Software formats, Data Scraped from HTML pages of popular closed Social Networking services, and whatever Social Data formats the cat drags in, via Open-Source, community-driven plugin infrastructure.
• Allow publishing of Social Data to numerous platforms like Semantic Web Standards, common Excel & CSV formats, Microformats, HTML, Mail Software formats,
• Enable cross-referencing of redundancies like checking email addresses against social networking services.
• Search, Filter, Tag
• In other words, really awesome multi-platform address book application/Identity manager.
• WordPress-like infrastructure and development community.
• Provide free, hosted version and downloadable, installable version, like WordPress.
• Preserve Privacy, Enhance Publicity.

Where we’re at with this.

• The beginning of a UI for the Address Book side
• Gmail and MySpace integration basically completed
• Matt is a full-time student and I am not a programmer. We need help!

If you are interested in helping us with this, comment here or email me at andrew a peterson at gmail

Also, we have a phpbb forum installed over there if you’d like to see some of our discussion. Feel free to register and jump right in with any ideas, questions, comments etc.