Ident Engine
Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. Weve 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 siteA 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 is a Firefox add-on that combines identities across various social network/media sites. Its uses the Ident Engine library .
This is the original server-side application on which the Ident Engine library is based.
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
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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 number of different resources you may find useful.
- Google Social Graph API
- Social Graph Node Mapper
- YQL
- URI-Template
- WebFinger
- XRD
- Portable Contacts API
- Hybrid Protocol (OpenID + OAuth) Demo
Comments
1
Simon
Hi Glenn,
I'm loving your effort on the Ident Engine library. I've been having a play around today looking to put together a quick Habari plugin making use of the library.
Can I make a few suggestions for improvements to the API or maybe I've missed something)?
I'd love to see ident.search('url') return the search results directly, or have a way of accessing the search results once the search is complete without going through the rendering callback.
Currently, as far as I can see, there's no reliable way to find out from within the calling function whether the search returned any results or not.
If I've missed something, let me know. Fantastic work regardless.
Posted 07 October 2009 02:40
2
Keenora
Hey Glenn!
I am really glad, that there is someone, who put so much work in such an awesome project. I just wanted to ask, if its possible to build custom plugins. I built a little plugin "ident.plugin.getFavIconUrl(url)" to get favicons through the appspot-application which was mentioned in your identengine-blog. Its really awesome :)
Thanks alot :)
greetings from germany, Keenora
Posted 19 October 2009 15:41
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