Opensocial: from Social Networks to Social Ecosystem

2007 Inaugural IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE DEST 2007) OpenSocial: From Social Networks to Social Ecosystem Juliana Mitchell-WongI, Ryszard Kowalczyk', Albena Rosheloval, Bruce Joy2 and Henry Tsai2 'Centre for Information Technology Research, Swinburne University, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia e-mail: (jmitchellwong, rkowalczyk, aroshelova)@ict.swin.edu.au 2Everyday Interactive Networks, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia, e-mail: (brucejoy, henrytsai)@ein.com.au ties to be managed using the one application. GAIM' and Abstract-Unlike the physical world where social ecosys- Trillian2 are two example applications for instant messaging tems are formed from the integrated and managed relation- communities. These applications however do not address ships between individuals and organisations, the online digital any of the fundamental issues: the independent and isolated world consists of many independent, isolated and incompatible nature of communities, the ignorance to overlapping rela- social networks established by organisations that have overlapping and manually managed relationships. To bring the tionships in different communities, or the manual manage- online digital world in-line with the physical world, integration ment of relationships. of social networks, identification of overlapping relationships Communities on the other hand have moved towards in social networks, and automation of relationship manage- forming alliances with other communities to enable content ment in social networks are required. OpenSocial is a frame- search and retrieval between them by using common ontol- work that enables social networks to interlink and self- use common organise into a social ecosystem guided by the policies of indi- ogy [1]. The of ontology enables communities viduals and organisations. to interlink, but each of these communities assumes that their policies are agreeable by every community in the alli- Index Terms-social framework, self-organised, self- ance. One issue that arises from this assumption is privacy. managed, policies. If a community shares personal and private information about its members to others in the alliance, it may lead to I. INTRODUCTION unsolicited interaction within the alliance. This concern can be addressed by enabling entities to The relationships formed between individuals and or- decide on the accessibility of its information by other enti- ganisations, and its management have created the social ties, in other words an entity-centric identity management ecosystem that we live in today. The technologies available system such as Identity 2.03 and Liberty Alliance Federated for establishing and maintaining this relationship have im- Identity [2]. Both these standards aim to provide identity proved over time and the development of technologies in management in the online world that is similar to the drivers the online digital world is now upon us. licence or passport in the physical world. This is where an Currently the online digital world consists of many social independent identity provider issues an identifier about the networking communities (social networks with interacting entity, and other entities can accept it and authenticate the tools and services) typically formed by organisations. These entity based on the identifier. Whobar4 is a new Identity 2.0 communities are independent, isolated and incompatible technology that enables entities to register and login using due to the lack of standard for forming social networks. 5. 6 identity protocols such as Windows CardSpace , i-names , Many entities (individuals and organisations) have found and OpenID7. This enables the entity's identity to be dis- that membership in a community limits the relationship they tributed according to its preferences while enabling other can form, that is to entities who are members of the com- entities to decide on the trustworthiness of the different au- munity. It also limits the type of interaction to the tools and thorities and their adequacy in providing authentication. services provided by the community. The entities have However entities are still faced with many tedious tasks found this to be too restrictive and not fully serving their such as entities with common interact- needs. discovering interest, ing, and managing relationships. This led organisations to establish their own communi- Automating these tasks can be achieved with policies de- ties, and individuals to become members of multiple com- fining the behaviour of agents based on the preferences of munities. Over a period of time the number of communities the entity [3-5]. This ease in discovering, interacting, and increased, many providing similar tools and services, and managing relationships in a social ecosystem makes it an had similar members. This soon became too time- ideal place to abuse the privacy and security of entities. consuming, complex and tedious for an individual to manage; and communities realised that forming alliances with 1 http:/gaim.sourceforge.net/ other communities could improve the content and services it 2 http://ceru1eanstudios.com/ provides to its members. 3 http://www.identity20.com/ Meanwhile, some individuals have resorted to actively 4 http://whobar.org/ 5 http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/infocard/default.aspx participating in only a few communities, whilst there are 6 http://www.inames.net/ others that use applications that enable different communi- 7http://openid.net/ 1-4244-0470-3/07/$20.00 ©2007 IEEE 361 Authorized licensed use limited to: SWINBURNE UNIV OF TECHNOLOGY. Downloaded on March 15,2010 at 05:24:22 EDT from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. 2007 Inaugural IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE DEST 2007) This abuse can be addressed by building a trust, reputa- making it scalable. And it resolves privacy of information tion and relation system through the monitoring and man- by allowing each entity to manage their profile. agement of interactions. This can be achieved by attaching The structure of this layer is modelled with the Agent sanctions or rewards to interaction behaviours. Modelling Language (AML) [8, 9] and is shown in Fig. 2. In this paper we propose OpenSocial that aims to deliver The agents in this structure are entities of the ecosystem. an open framework that is scalable, interoperable, and in- Some of these entities may host communities with members clusive of all existing communities to ensure rapid adoption. consisting of other entities. It supports a social ecosystem that interlinks individuals and The functionality of this layer is to enable the linking of organisations, and enables the automation and management entities in the ecosystem. of their social networks. It is set to change the Internet from a provider-centric (multiple consumers are related to a pro- B. Automation and Management Layer vider) to a consumer-centric (multiple providers are related The automation and management layer is built on top of to a consumer) paradigm leading to a change from informa- the connectivity layer. This layer is represented by a number tion pull (consumer requesting) to push (provider predicting of intelligent software agents that automate the interaction the consumer request). requested by the entity and upholds the integrity of the so- The paper presents the OpenSocial framework with Sec- cial ecosystem according to the entity-defined policies. tion II describing the framework design and Section III de- These policies ensure the agents perform to the require- tailing the lifecycle of automating an interaction request. ments of the entity in an autonomous and consistently trust- Section IV demonstrates a case study for the framework and worthy manner; thus enabling the interlinking of entities Section V describes an implementation of the framework. across communities that would otherwise be too tedious and Finally the concluding remarks and future work are pre- time-consuming to perform. sented in Section VI. Automation agents include linkage to the ecosystem, search for entities, authentication of entities, authorisation II. FRAMEWORK DESIGN of entities, comparison of identities, negotiation of policies, and the monitoring of interactions. Each of these agents has The framework design is outlined in Fig. 1. It consists of policies governing their automation. three layers: connectivity, automation and management, and Linking to the ecosystem involves selecting one entity application. that has a static IP address and is always available in the A. Connectivity Layer ecosystem, and linking to it. This in turn will provide links to other entities in the ecosystem. An AML model of the The foundational connectivity layer is built on a distrib- linking specification is shown in Fig. 3. uted or peer-to-peer (P2P) infrastructure with a peer repre- Searching for other entities involves finding the links an There are many P2P pro- senting entity. existing routing representing the entities which include known entities, re- tocols that can be implemented such as Kademlia Gnutella, ferred entities and randomly selected entities from the eco- [6] and Tapestry [7]. system. This infrastructure addresses issues in scalability and Authenticating identifiers received from other entities privacy. It enables new entities to be easily added to the involves sending the received identifier to the claimed iden- ecosystem without great cost to any single entity in content tity provider to validate the authenticity of the identifier.

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