Good to see the Social Web incubator group charter. Great start! Harry Halpin had talked about it when he visited Tokyo and had a meeting with some W3C members here along with prof. Hideaki Takeda and I from NII. I feel that a group like this can play a very important role in identifying and addressing practical challenges that are still hindering the adoption of open semantic standards in the social web. While movements like Data portability, SIOC and FOAF have been very successful in the Semantic Web world, many issues like privacy, authentication, ownership, security, trust etc should still be addressed if such standards are to be publicly accepted. Otherwise, people feel safe and comfortable within walled data gardens while social web companies prefer to hold their customers and their data.
The mission of the Social Web Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, is to explore the development of open standards for social data portability built on existing W3C standards and standards developed by the community, and to promote these solutions within the W3C.
Aman\'s Blog 