Seventh International Conference on Web Engineering - Resumé

This year’s ICWE conference took place in Como, Italy. As during the last years, I enjoyed very much the open atmosphere and the many interesting discussions both in and outside the sessions. Moreover, the Web Engineering community seems to advance in terms of common activities: The society (ISWE) won many new members, while at the same time more and more groups cooperate on a working level, as e.g. in the context of the MDWEnet initiative.

Real-life testbed for Federation research

Within the last few days, several Web sites have gone online, where I am involved in the development and operation process: a relaunch of the community portal webengineering.org, the official Web site of the International Society for Web Engineering e.V. (iswe-ev.de), and a homepage for the Hanoi research project. This is a nice opportunity for applying our Federation-related research approaches and systems. Currently, all sites already use idFS for access control.

OpenID

Still following up on all the exiting new developments that could be seen at the World Wide Web conference, I gave a group-internal presentation today on OpenID. OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. Web sites supporting OpenId let users identity by entering their URL (e.g. of their homepage) and delegate the authentication process to arbitrary identity providers. As a result, users can access many different sites using the same account, which has a lot of interesting implications on how data can be used across multiple applications.

ISWE Meeting in Karlsruhe

The next meeting of the members of the International Society for Web Engineering e.V. will take place in Karlsruhe, on Fri, 6 July 2007. The society promotes science and research in the entire field of Web Engineering, i.e. the systematic engineering of Web applications. Among other issues, we will discuss last preparations for the society’s appearance on this year’s Web Engineering conference (ICWE 2007).

idFS Version 2.1

After a longer period of work related to other things, I have recently found the time to continue working on my research prototype, the Identity Federation System (idFS). idFS is a system that can be used to secure Web applications and Web services with security tokens, based on Federation specifications. Today, I completed version 2.1, which solves some technical difficulties with certificates and is now compatible with the latest specifications.

More Semantics

Continuing my private experiments with machine-readable information on the Web, I have recently added some semantic mark-up directly into the page. Today’s browsers cannot see this, but you can make it visible by using plug-ins, like for example Operator and Tails (for the Firefox browser) or by entering my homepage URL into the Tabulator. Technically, the markup is extracted by using a new W3C draft called GRDDL. Adding semantics into Web pages is actually not very difficult. The challenging part is to transform your legacy HTML files into an XHTML-compliant format, which is the precondition for extraction mechanism to work.

FOAF-games

FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is a project for machine-readable modelling of homepage-like profiles and social networks with the means of the Semantic Web. Last week, I experimented a bit with my own profile and some Semantic Web tools, which become increasingly available (e.g. the Tabulator or the FOAF explorer). Hopefully, there will be some more data to link to in the near future.