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The term was introduced in a July 2004 paper called "The Social Web: Building an Open Social Network with XDI" published in the PlaNetwork Journal by members of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee. This paper owes much to the Augmented Social Network paper published for the PlaNetwork conference the previous year.
The Social Web paper explains how the introduction of a new protocol for distributed mediated data sharing and synchronization, XDI, could enable a new layer of trusted data interchange applications. The key building blocks for this layer are I-names and I-numbers (based on the OASIS XRI specifications), Dataweb pages, and link contracts.
Perhaps the best analogy for the Social Web is the worldwide banking and credit card system. This infrastructure has evolved over centuries to facilitate the global exchange of a very sensitive form of data — money — by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — banks. The Social Web takes the same approach for exchange of private, sensitive information by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — i-brokers.
Social Web infrastructure also anticipates the need for networks of i-brokers to establish common trust agreements — the social analog of credit card associations like Visa, MasterCard, and AMEX. The first example of such a trust federation adopting this approach is Identity Commons.
The Universalization of the Virtual Identity Virtual Rights, a new Legal Entity: the Virtual Identity, and a new Fundamental Right: Not to have or have a Virtual Identity are also closely related to the Social Web.