Today’s zyb.com release introduced, among a lot of things, the semantic formats FOAF and SIOC for all profile pages. Actually, FOAF has been supported for a few weeks now, whereas SIOC is just released today.

FOAF is an XML standard for describing contact information much like the vCard format used by your phone, Outlook and others. SIOC describes actions performed by ZYB users such as Shouting, writing comments or updating status messages on Facebook. Together FOAF and SIOC provide a powerful API for gathering information by third-parties.

For a couple of months now, you have also been able to import contacts from FOAF. It could be a FOAF document somewhere on the web or on your own hard drive.

Why is it important?

At ZYB we strongly believe that the data we hold for our users do not belong to us. It is solely the property of the individual users. In that regard, we want to take every step necessary to ensure the user can do with the data what she wants. That includes data portability and that’s what FOAF and SIOC is all about. Some people call it Web 3.0 – we call it respect for our users.

It is a goal that we both create and consume various semantic formats - first of all because it is of great personal interest by the ZYB developers, but also because it can help us to provide a much greater experience for the users.

What about privacy?

Since ZYB holds very sensitive information for all our users, we take privacy very seriously. That’s why the FOAF document renderers differently depending on who requests it. If you request your own FOAF document, you get all the information that we can possibly give you. Anyone else will only get the bare minimum, but enough to make sense for them together with SIOC.

You’ll find the two formats at zyb.com/profilename.foaf and zyb.com/profilename.sioc respectively.

In the following weeks, we’ll write more about how data portability and the semantic web play a big part of our development efforts.