Towards an OpenID-based solution to the Social Network Interoperability problem

The main aim of this paper is to present the OpenPlatform, the Asemantics OpenID solution developed for several Italian web portals. Starting from the developers’ experience in the field of digital identity, this work also describes the Global Social Platform as an open-standard based solution to the Social Networks interoperability problem. Basically, it consists of a platform allowing users to aggregate their social graphs that are spread over a bunch of different social networks. The OpenID main concepts, such as the user Identity Page, are the foundational ideas behind the Global Social Platform since they can be considered as the unique place where information is stored. A set of Java API is provided in order to write Adapters and Converters that are, mainly, Global Social Platform plugins allowing third party developers to pull data from different data silos and showing them in several different formats.