Entity-centric Social Profile Integration

Web-based social networking applications gained considerable popularity in the recent years. However, most social networking platforms suffer from the limits of the centralized paradigm they adopted, limiting the mobility of their users, and their chances to benefit from diverse services. In this paper we want to illustrate how these limitations can be overcome by enabling a global naming service for the ’social semantic web’. To do so, we will describe a web tool, called foaf-Omatic, for creating FOAF profiles which is enabled to interact with a global naming system called Entity Name System (ENS). Through a well-known mashup system called Sigma, we will show how the use of globally shared IDs in the definition of user profiles enables frictionless integrations mechanism supporting web-based application interoperability in dealing with users information.