Heh, this was planned as a one-week hack but somehow turned into a full re-write that took the complete December. Yesterday, I finally managed to tame the semantic bot army and today I've added a basic RDF editor. A sponsored version is now online at knowee.net, a code bundle for self-hosting will be made available at knowee.org tomorrow.

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.

I'm still working on a solution for access control, the current Knowee version is limited to public data and simple, password-based access restrictions. OAuth is surely worth a look, although Knowee's use case is a little different and may be fine with just OpenID + sessions. Another option could be the impressive FOAF+SSL proposal, I'm not sure if they'll manage to provide a pure-PHP implementation for non-SSL-enabled hosts, though.

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.

That's more or less it for this version. You can always reset or delete your account, and manually delete incorrectly monitored graphs. The knowee.net system is running on the GoGrid cloud, but I'm still tuning things to let the underlying RDF CMS make better use of the multi-server setup. If things go wrong, blame me, not them. Caching is not fully in place yet, and I've limited the installation to 100 accounts. Give it a try, I'd be happy about feedback.