Ident Engine

15 years ago – Updated: 10 years ago – public

Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We have filled in profiles, uploaded photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. The Ident Engine uses semantic web API’s to bring together these web footprints.

Ident Engine site /> A List Apart – Ident Engine

The Ident Engine is part of a year long personal project into combining social graph data with other open data sources. With over 1.3 billion hCard profiles on the web and RDF growing in strength, the semantic web has reached a tipping point. I built the Ident Engine to show that constructing user experiences by blending semantic web APIs and other open data sources is not only practical, but offers exciting opportunities.

Related projects

Identify – Firefox add-on /> Identify is a Firefox add-on that combines identities across various social network/media sites. Its uses the Ident Engine library.

Social Graph Explorer /> This is the original server-side application on which the Ident Engine library is based.

Microformat API – OAuth /> This experimental demo showes how OAuth can be used to add privacy to open data sources like microformats and feeds.

Presentations

I have given a number of talks about blending social graph data and other open data sources over the last year. The slide deck from Twiist.be in Leuven (below) contains the most update version of my /> talks.

Experiments in Data Portability 2 /> Twiist.be – Leuven, Belgium /> 15 May 2009 />
How to connect social media with open standards /> Social Web Foocamp – Sebastopol, CA /> 18 April 2009 />
How I built the demo’s /> Barcamp London 6 – London, UK /> 28 March 2009 />
Microformats: A Quiet Revolution /> SXSW – Austin, TX /> 14 March 2009 />
Experiments in Data Portability /> Skillswap – Brighton, UK – 25 November 2008