Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We have filled in profiles, uploaded photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. The Ident Engine uses semantic web API’s to bring together these web footprints.
Ident Engine site
A List Apart – Ident Engine
The Ident Engine is part of a year long personal project into combining social graph data with other open data sources. With over 1.3 billion hCard profiles on the web and RDF growing in strength, the semantic web has reached a tipping point. I built the Ident Engine to show that constructing user experiences by blending semantic web APIs and other open data sources is not only practical, but offers exciting opportunities.
Related projects
Identify – Firefox add-on
Identify is a Firefox add-on that combines identities across various social network/media sites. Its uses the Ident Engine library.
Social Graph Explorer
This is the original server-side application on which the Ident Engine library is based.
Microformat API – OAuth
This experimental demo showes how OAuth can be used to add privacy to open data sources like microformats and feeds.
Presentations
I have given a number of talks about blending social graph data and other open data sources over the last year. The slide deck from Twiist.be in Leuven (below) contains the most update version of my
talks.
- Experiments in Data Portability 2
Twiist.be – Leuven, Belgium
15 May 2009
- How to connect social media with open standards
Social Web Foocamp – Sebastopol, CA
18 April 2009
- How I built the demo’s
Barcamp London 6 – London, UK
28 March 2009
- Microformats: A Quiet Revolution
SXSW – Austin, TX
14 March 2009
- Experiments in Data Portability
Skillswap – Brighton, UK – 25 November 2008
Articles
- Identify: Google People With Two Keystrokes
Read Write Web article on the Identify Firefox addon
by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Resources
If you are interested in this area I have listed a numberof different resources you may find useful.