TPAC/2013/FederatedProfile

TPAC Federated Profiles Breakout Session

13 Nov 2013

Present: Adam_Boyet (Chair), Scott_Cassady, Wu_Wei, Pan_Deng_(Intel), Ann_Bassetti (Scribe), Mark_Crawford_(SAP)

Adam Boyet introduces the subject

why Boeing is interested in the problem of federating profile information

need to brainstorm with others

Adam shows presentation from Social Business Workshop http://www.w3.org/2013/socialweb/presentations/boyet.pdf

Andrew Fregly, Verisign comes in

Intel uses SharePoint

AndrewF did Knowledge Management consulting for KPMG

he saw SharePoint as dominant in industry wonders if there is a need

Adam points out that even though many companies use SharePoint, we also use many other products

the issue is how to take the data from one product to another Jive is very big, IBM Connections

Andrew: so then does it become a basic 'mapping' problem? 
... mapping fields between tools, and also, how to preserve the semantics 
... also rating 
... suggests starting with the big tools

Mark Crawford (SAP) came in the room

as a result of the W3C Social Business Workshop, Adam plans to start a Community Group on how to federate profile information would like to get ideas from others on basic protocols, existing tools and techniques

Wu Wei (W3C and RTT): few Chinese companies use these kinds of tools

AnnB explains the difference between Human Resource profile data and User-contributed data about themselves

Andrew: it's hard to get consistency with the user-contributed data

Mark: your profile information should be like your phone number you should be able to take it with you anywhere

SAP has social tool "Jam"

Mark: in last 4 years, they have changed tools several times and then end up having all 3 tools now 
... also sees a merging of identity and profile

Scott: Â profile is your extended identity?

Andrew: anticipates there will be islands of identity information

Mark: this is a crucial foundational piece for our analytics

SAP has provided a combination of profiles and analytics for sports teams

Andrew: has anyone thought about producing a tool into which you feed a profile and 'normalizes' it

Adam: this is quite different than what Twitter, Facebook and other public tools are doing

Mark: don't exclude the public tools (Facebook, etc)

Adam: my hope is that we can define the common format to describe profile information, and the protocol with which it is shared and that the various vendors would use it 1:53 
... microformats are out there, other pieces¦ we don't want to reinvent anything; if we can use it, or bring bits together, that would be better

Andrew: I would study the LinkedIn profile format applies more to business

Mark: yes, it would be best if we can leverage a format, or ideas that are already out there

.. suggests looking CCTS .. an extension of metadata registry spec from JTC1

Ann: adds a concept of 'context' 
... that's a way to get extensibility

Adam: the Social Business Workshop report suggests (in draft now) there will be a Social Activity, Social Interest Group (to act as a 'steward' of the various activities), and then individual groups 
... still emerging

Andrew: maybe you could define a series of containers, super high-level

Mark: I'd hope we'd be more granular up-front .. e.g., we have multiple ways we define "person"

Ann: we should be able to reach 80% agreement on what "person" means

Pan: I don't know too much about this topic, but it sounds useful

Scott: how would this standard look? ... can we build upon common formats, such as info on business card .. etc

Wu Wei: maybe start with gap analysis?

Adam: yes, we need to do that .. we need to look at what's out there, what's missing, what do we need to add or expand 
... we need to revisit the gap analysis that was done earlier, ditto use cases

Mark: need to be cautious because a lot of those use cases were "social" in the public, rather than the internal enterprise social business use cases 2:07 
... look at what the Boeing use cases are; ditto Ford; ditto what IBM and SAP see with their customers

Andrew: identify a lot of the business stakeholders

Mark: we need to be in contact with government folks

Andrew: knows someone who is responsible to for coordinating data across USA govt orgs

Summary

• first task: identify stakeholders, find out their requirements,
• survey existing tools, formats, taxonomies, etc
• start the Community Group plus the other activities being developed as part of the "Social Activity'
• identify participants from non-American companies
• be sensitive to Internationalization issues, privacy issues