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In the current Social Web tools such as Zemanta Reblog, Share This, Reblog, Move My Data or Press This, allow users to reuse content across application boundaries, but have several limitations:

1.) Loosing semantic metadata and relations: The information about the relations, which connect
the resource to reuse with other resources stored on the source application (= the application from where the content to reuse originates), get lost. Furthermore the property values, which are not selected to be reused, but belong to the resource, get lost. Only the selected property values (which are in the case of a reblogging scenario part of the content property value of a resource from type post) are copied. For example comments or tags, which are related with the original resource, get lost and are not associated with the newly created resource.

2.) Loosing origin: The information about the origin of the copied content get lost. That means the newly created resource, which holds all or parts of the property values of a resource, does not contain any machine understandable information about its origin. No machine understandable connection is exposed between the source application from, where the content originates and the target application, where the content is republished.

3.) No ”Reuse As” possible: The user has no way to influence the reusing process. That means users
cannot freely define that they want for example an external resource to be reused as comment of a certain
internal resource of the target application. They can also not define that the external resource
should only be visible for certain users of the target application. The user cannot define relations
between the resource to reuse and the internal resources of the target application, although this
would allow users to express how they want an application to reuse resources.

4.) No Reuse by Reference possible: Users cannot choose if they want to reuse a resource by value
or by reference, because resources can only be reused by value. If a resource is reused by value,
the whole resource with all data property values is copied. If a resource is reuse by reference,
only the reference is copied and the data belonging to the reference are fetched on demand. The
resource to reuse is stored on one application, but is displayed on several applications. In the
current Social Web reusing data by reference is not possible, because no global identifiers are used
and no descriptions can be fetched via these identifiers. To get data from a Social Web application
a client must firstly know via which method it can get the description of the resource and must
secondly know the local, application specific identifiers of the resource which the method needs as
parameter, in order to return the description of the right resource.

5.) Limited set of supported target applications: Users can reuse the selected content only on one
of the target applications, which is supported by the reusing tool they use. Each tool supports only
a defined set of target applications, because it must implement the API of each target application. No standarized data manipulation method exists in the current Social Web.

Semantic Web technologies provide the required mechanisms to overcome the identified Data Portability limitations. To show this is the aim of my prototype.