Alexandre Passant

We're glad to announce that the second edition of the SPOT workshop - Trust and Privacy on the Social and Semantic Web - will be held at ESWC2010.

More than ever, the Semantic Web is becoming reality as it is an integrated component of the Web we are browsing everyday - be it the Open Linked Data movement that nowadays exposes over 10 billion triples of RDF or the annotated and structured information available on Web pages used by major search engines, such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey and Google. Moreover, social data about people and their interaction is made available in machine-understandable format in projects like FOAF or SIOC. Facing this amount of data, privacy and trust consideration is an important step to take right now. The challenging research questions arising from this movement include:

• How do people know that the data gathered from several sources for reasoning purposes can be trusted?
• How can one avoid that personal data exposed on the Semantic Web will be combined with other available semantic data in a way that sensitive information may be revealed?
• How shall a safe reasoning process look like that does not end up in a conflict only because a single Semantic Web peer exposed a contradiction?

As last year, we expect both theoretical and practical contributions (including demos) on these hot topics.
For more information about the workshop, deadlines, etc. please check the SPOT2010 website.

I had a chat yesterday on Skype with Henry, wondering how FOAF-SSL applications would react on the following scenario:

• My personal URI redirects to a document about myself using a 303 redirect;
• This document is not a native RDF/XML or turtle file, but an XHTML documents embedding RDFa annotations.

Indeed, the current FOAF-SSL online certificate generation tool relies only on personal URIs (or WebID if you prefer) that corresponds to fragments of RDF documents, as in http://example.org/foaf.rdf#me. However, it shouldn't be an issue for the clients, since most recent Semantic Web applications should be able to deal with such scenarios of redirect and RDFa. And indeed, it worked perfectly - at least on the two FOAF-SSL clients that I tried with Firefox (something wrong in Safari not asking for any certificate)

It took me only a few minutes to set-up and try this complete use-case (well, actually a bit more to test it, until I discovered the Safari issue):

• Create my certificate and upload it in my browser using this tutorial;
• Generate the related RDFa snippet corresponding to the certificate, see below or in ESW Wiki;

<div about="#cert" typeof="rsa:RSAPublicKey">
  <div rel="cert:identity" href="http://apassant.net/alex"></div>
  <div rel="rsa:public_exponent">
    <div property="cert:decimal" content="65537"></div>
  </div>
  <div rel="rsa:modulus">
    <div property="cert:hex" content="8af4cb6d6ec004bd28c08d37f63301a3e63ddfb812475c679cf073c4dc7328bd20dadb9654d4fa588f155ca0
5e7ca61a6898fbace156edb650d2109ecee65e7f93a2a26b3928d3b97feeb7aa062e3767f4fadfcf169a223f4a621583a7f6fd8992f65ef1d17bc42392f
2d6831993c49187e8bdba42e5e9a018328de026813a9f"></div>
  </div>
</div>

• Add the cert and rsa namespace in my Drupal template header - even easier as I already have the other namespaces here, as well as GRDDL profile and correct DTD)
• Edit my about page (that is provided via the 303 redirection from my URI) with Drupal to add the RDFa snippet in it;
• Successfuly log-in to a test-page (that uses ARC2 - which natively supports that 303+RDFa scenarios, hence enabling that RDFa FOAF-SSL scenario) and in the Cheese lovers club; below is the output of the first one

It's now time for related applications, and I hope I'll be able to write more about it in the future.

I'm happy to announce that the proceedings of the upcoming ESWC2009 Worshop on Trust and Privacy on the Social and Semantic Web (SPOT2009) have just been published via CEUR-WS (ISSN: 1613-0073) on Vol-447.

The proceedings include the 9 papers that have been selected for the workshop (from a total of 16 submissions - a big thanks to all the PC members for their work !) as well as the abstract of the keynote that will be given by Prof. Piero Bonatti and a workshop preface. This is the opportunity to read them before the event in order to engage discussions at the workshop if you'll attend it. In any case you will get an overview of recent research trends on the topic, papers varying from theoretical approaches to software implementations on the topics of trust and privacy on the (Social and Semantic) Web.

Due to multiple requests, we just extended the deadline for the
SPOT2009 - Trust and Privacy on the Social and Semantic Web workshop at ESWC09 to 11 March 2009, 11:59pm UTC

Hence, you have a few days left to submit your (short and long) papers as well as demo and application reports, whatever they are theorical or practical contributions to the field of trust and privacy on the Web.

Please note that this is a hard deadline which will not further be extended.