Speaking at XTech: Social Content Web Services

While the final schedule isn’t up yet, I’ve received an email to note that one of my XTech proposals has been accepted.
The paper is titled “Connecting Social Content Services using FOAF, RDF and REST”, and here’s the abstract I submitted:

A growing number of “social content” applications such as flickr, del.icio.us, audioscrobbler, and AllConsuming are making open web services part of their core offering to end users. These interfaces allow users to query, share, and manipulate the data managed on their behalf by these social content applications.
Web service interfaces make such sites more attractive to end users by removing the danger of data lock-in, while simultaneously providing the users with tools that allow them to gain the most value from their data. This translates into direct benefits for the service itself as the end users extend the reach and visibility of the application by publishing the content on their own websites and ‘blogs.
Based on a brief review of the common features of a selection of these sites, this paper suggests some best practice guidelines that developers can follow when creating new service interfaces for similar applications.
Recognising that it is the end user that is the pivotal component in the success of such applications, these best practices will be used to propose a simple mechanism for connecting together social content based sites with the aim of provide richer, autonomous data exchange.
This architecture will focus on the use of FOAF descriptions of users as a service intermediary, and RESTful web services, exchanging RDF and RSS data, as the means of data exchange.

The other proposal as about my recent work to add RSS1.0/DC/PRISM based RSS feeds to the IngentaConnect website. Rather than a paper, I’ll probably write up the main points in a separate blog posting.
Anyway, looking forward to the conference already, see you all there!