What is Knowee?
Knowee started as a SWEO project. Given the insane number of online social networks we all joined, together with the increasing amount of machine-readable "social data" sources, we dreamed of a distributed address book, where the owner doesn't have to manually maintain contact data, but instead simply subscribes to remote sources. The address book could then update itself automatically. And -in full SemWeb spirit- you'd get access to your consolidated social graph for re-purposing. There are several open-source projects in this area, most notably NoseRub and DiSo. Knowee is aiming at interoperability with these solutions.
Ingredients
For a webby address book, we need to pick some data formats, vocabularies, data exchange mechanisms, and the general app infrastructure:- PHP + MySQL: Knowee is based on the ubiquitous LAMP stack. It tries to keep things simple, you don't need system-level access for third-party components or cron jobs.
- RDF: Knowee utilizes the Resource Description Framework. RDF gives us a very simple model (triples), lots of different formats (JSON, HTML, XML, ...), and free, low-cost extensibility.
- FOAF, OpenSocial, microformats, Feeds: FOAF is the leading RDF vocabulary for social information. Feeds (RSS, Atom) are the lowest common denominator for exchanging non-static information. OpenSocial and microformats are more than just schemas, but the respective communities maintain very handy term sets, too. Knowee uses equivalent representations in RDF.
- SPARQL: SPARQL is the W3C-recommended Query language and API for the Semantic Web.
- OpenID: OpenID addresses Identity and Authentication requirements.
Features / Getting Started
This is a quick walk-through to introduce the current version.Login / Signup
Log in with your (ideally non-XRDS) OpenID and pick a user name.
Account setup
Knowee only supports a few services so far. Adding new ones is not hard, though. You can enable the SG API to auto-discover additional accounts. Hit "Proceed" when you're done.
Profile setup
You can specify whether to make (parts of) your consolidated profile public or not. During the initial setup process, this screen will be almost empty, you can check back later when the semantic bots have done their job. Hit "Proceed".
Dashboard
The Dashboard shows your personal activity stream (later versions may include your contacts' activities, too), system information and a couple of shortcuts.
Contacts
The contact editor is still work in progress. So far, you can filter the list, add new entries, and edit existing contacts. The RDF editor is still pretty basic (Changes will be saved to a separate RDF graph, but deleted/changed fields may re-appear after synchronization. This needs more work.) The editor is schema-based and supports the vocabularies mentioned above. You'll be able to create your own fields at some later stage.It's already possible to import FOAF profiles. Knowee will try to consolidate imported contacts so that you can add data from multiple sources, but then edit the information via a single form. The bot processor is extensible, we'll be able to add additional consolidators at run-time, it only looks at "owl:sameAs" at the moment.

Enabling the SPARQL API
In the "Settings" section you'll find a form that lets you activate a personal SPARQL API. You can enable/protect read and/or write operations. The SPARQL endpoint provides low-level access to all your data, allows you to explore your social graph, or lets you create backups of your activity stream.

Comments and Trackbacks
Sorry! You will not be able to login to this website as it is using an older version of the the OpenID technology. Yahoo! only supports OpenID 2.0 because it is more secure. For more information, check out the OpenID documentation at Yahoo! Developer Network.
I know that yahoo has its own problems, but is there anyway to confirm that this is an issue?
Sounds like an exciting project you got going. Looking forward to seeing more.
I'm tired of all the various self-contained social networks, and with the burst of interest in Google Wave, I was momentarily excited at the prospect of an internet standard that would cover some of the aspects that make Facebook et al. popular.
Then I realized one of the big draws of Facebook is that it's basically a shared addressbook, and realized that if something like Google Wave utilized an OpenID-based social address book solution, then you could just "add people you know" and never have to worry about keeping their contact details up to date, same as with a social network.
I'm hopeful for the future... And the advances that social networking has brought falling out of the hands of any one popular network/company, and into commodity internet standards.