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I am starting this blog mainly for tow reasons:

Firstly to document how my work and my thesis are going on at KMi, Open University, and secondly to write down my ideas and thoughts to make them discussible and to get feedback.

My plan is to write at least once a week what I have done and what I am going to do next.  The title of my work (which I changed a million times) is finally “User controlled Data Portability in the Social Semantic Web“. So my work focuses on mechanisms, approaches and methods which allow users to control the portability of their user generated content (UGC).

What does it means and why do I care about this topic?
The vision of the Social Semantic Web is that individual Social Web applications will be able to interoperate and share the content generated by their users due to Semantic Web technologies. The content becomes separated from individual applications and in series reusable and shareable across application boundaries. This brings many advantages for users (e.g. they will be able to reuse their content across applications instead of copying and recreating content manually for each application) and also for applications (e.g. they can use UGC which was not originally created on their platform to increase the added value of their platform or to provide any service on the top of the data). But the automatic recentralization (i.e. the aggregation and combination) of user’s distributed bits of content, which might be relatively harmless by themselves, can compromise the individual privacy if made public in a central place with no qualifications.
Therefore the Social Semantic Web needs from my point of view sophisticated security and access control mechanisms, which allow an average user to easily express his privacy needs ( access restrictions -> which parts of his content can be accessed by whom) and his simultaneous information disclosure desire (access obligation -> what content should go where).
The contribution my work will be to find out how the privacy needs and information disclosure needs of users can be modelled and shared across Social Semantic Web applications.

My working plan for the next 3-4 weeks:
The first step is to find out what exactly users want and need to express (e.g. this is my flickr photo and I only want to allow my facebook friend Sue and my flickr friend Tim to see it OR this is my twitter account and this my flickr account and I want that these tow data streams are connected via common dates and locations and that a client which is allowed to access a photo also gets the associated tweets OR this my linkedIn account and this is my facebook account and all clients which are allowed to access my linkedIn account should not be allowed to access my facebook account). To find out what users need I will reuse existing scenarios and find new scenarios, which describe normal situations of users in the Social Semantic Web. From these scenarios I will hopefully be able to derive some requirements and to generalize them. The next step will be a literature review about methods to control content access and content sharing in the Semantic Web. I will analyse if my requirements can be met by existing approaches.

Depending on this outcome I will plan the next steps together with Enrico.
So that is all at the moment. Feedback and comments are always very welcome.

Now its time for the Blitznight (whatever that is) http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/calendar/event_detail.rhtm?cat=special&recID=475932
But in Milton Keynes the possibilities to go out are rare, so I must not be choosy…