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16 May 2007
XTech Day 2 - Gavin Bell - 'What is your provenance?'
Posted by Paul Miller at May 16, 2007 05:37 PM
Gavin Bell from Nature is back on the stage, following his involvement in last night's BOF.
“Who you are matters, but maybe less than you think. Dunbar and his critics have pointed out only 150 people matter at most to anyone, at any point. Yet we focus on people all the time: Google makes use of this temporary focus in the pagerank algorithm. Social networking sites offer a domain specific set of links and metadata, which allow reliable discovery and tracking tools to be created, e.g. flickr pictures of snow.
Based on scientific communities, this talk will explore how people can act as navigational tools to allow interdisciplinary navigation, signposting the way from astro-physics to xeno-biology. We are comfortable with tags as navigational devices, but a tag means something to me, not to you. Knowing the person gives you the context to understand the meaning of the tag.
We have a word for it already 'provenance', no antique dealer will buy something without knowing the provenance, should we care as much online? What makes good provenance and how can we make it subject specific?
Looking at technologies such as XFN, FOAF, federated identity and Web 2.0 friends tagging and social networking services this talk will explore how we assess, form and make these navigational jumps and how the coming age of ubiquity will force us to face the potential fragmentation of the internet into tag soup, served cold.”
Looking at ideas of identity on the internet, building upon ideas in the day job around identity and its role in the scientific career.
Provenance is the history of an object; where it's from, who's handled it, when it was made, etc.
Provenance is increasingly important on the internet, as we spend more time online, and leave more information related to ourselves. The internet is really about people.
Most people prefer a reference from a friend to a result from a search.
Imagine ten years from now; what devices will we use? How will our identity be instantiated? How will we find people? Look at how this has changed, with the formalisation of surnames, the addition of postal addresses, the near ubiquity of telephone numbers, etc.
An individual like Gavin is 'identified' in a large number of (not always unique) ways; Flickr logins, blog URIs, IRC handles, Dopplr travel traces, etc.
Is OpenID the answer to identity consolidation? Not just about authentication as it might appear; allows for the representation of self.
Identity not just about self; the network of associations to our peers also important... although these are terribly fragmented online currently; my AIM buddies, my MSN contacts, my Twitter followers, my Skype contacts, my LinkedIn links, my Facebook friends, my Flickr friends, my Delicio.us bookmarks [if I had any] etc. There is some overlap, but I probably don't have all the 'identities' for all of my acquaintances, and it is difficult to move from one to the other effectively.
“People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network, but I'm already part of a network; the Internet”
Jon Udell
Tags offer a means to begin linking various things together, introducing opportunities for serendipitous discovery.
“Can I sum the output of my friends to work out who knows what?”
“Can I manage people and not feeds?”
Sounds like the sort of thing that LinkedIn are doing with their Q&A function... although that's limited as it's locked inside their network, and only surfaced via one of their web pages.
Shows an example of identity consolidation, initially based upon himself and his various online presences, to scrape data from different sites in different ways to build a profile of himself, his online associations, and the linkages between each.
As well as the purposes for which Gavin intends this, I can see real value in the rather dull process of enabling me to find people with whom I am already connected via one service we both use, in order to connect with them on a second service that we both use but on which we have not discovered one another for whatever reason...
Photo by Rob Styles.
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