This week we were joined by Web Scientist Phil Waddell as a “critical friend” (basically someone to provide an unbiased opinion of the project… give ideas which we might not have thought of… etc…).
His main contribution was questioning the motives of the project (a technical challenge or a crusade for a more open web?). This focused our minds on what the goals are and how we are different from what exists.
The main problem this raised is “If we are trying to stop everyone having to store their data with facebook – why should everyone have to store their data with us?” and this led us to think more seriously about open data and how it can be achieved.
Our mission goals have now been more firmly targeted on removing the monopolisation of image data from the large social networks. Rather than images being trapped in Facebook or Orkut or Flickr, we believe people should be able to host their photos anywhere and still be able to tag them in the same way. Moreover the choice of where the image is hosted shouldn’t restrict who can see or interact with the tagged photos. Phil mentioned this article by Tim Burners-Lee which expresses this sentiment well.
I have a few technical solutions to this, the designs of which I will post shortly, but the important part from this week is that our research is now going to be more firmly focused on distributing the data across independent servers, and linking it together when needed. With this in mind it was decided that for the next week; Deep, Sumair, Bharat, and Larry are to concentrate on researching Linked Data and decentralisation of social networks (eg: http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/decentralization.pdf) while Jonny will modify the designs and update the prototype to take some of these new ideas into account.
This week Bharat presented a video on a location tagging system which brings in relevant data about the world around you through augmented reality, and also some information about the ways in which social networking ideas such as tagging are now entering the enterprise domain. Deep presented the Microsoft Tag format which allows tagging of points of interest in the real world, and also TaggingRobot which aggregates tagged data from social networks and presents them in a more useful way. Jonny presented his mockups and use case diagrams of the system as it stands (although with the decisions made today they will probably change). Larry was absent.