Social networking sites have gained much popularity in the recent years because of the opportunities they give to people to connect to each other in an easy and timely manner, and to exchange and share various kinds of information. However, these sites are based on a centralised paradigm, which limits the mobility of their users, and ultimately, their chances to establish new relationships and benefit from diverse networking services. In this paper, we argue for a decentralised paradigm for social networking, in which users retain control of their profiles, and social networking sites focus on the delivery of innovative and competitive services. In this environment, both the social networking sites and their users will be able to develop to their full potential. This goal can be achieved by using a combination of semantic web technologies and tools, loosening the bind between the social network management and social networking web applications.

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Abstract-Big Data applications are rapidly moving from a batch-oriented execution model to a streaming execution model in order to extract value from the data in real-time. However, processing live data alone is often not enough: in many cases, such applications need to combine the live data with previously archived data to increase the quality of the extracted insights. Current streaming-oriented runtimes and middlewares are not flexible enough to deal with this trend, as they address ingestion (collection and pre-processing of data streams) and persistent storage (archival of intermediate results) using separate services. This separation often leads to I/O redundancy (e.g., write data twice to disk or transfer data twice over the network) and interference (e.g., I/O bottlenecks when collecting data streams and writing archival data simultaneously). In this position paper, we argue for a unified ingestion and storage architecture for streaming data that addresses the aforementioned challenge. We identify a set of constraints and benefits for such a unified model, while highlighting the important architectural aspects required to implement it in real life. Based on these aspects, we briefly sketch our plan for future work that develops the position defended in this paper.

The fast growth of scientific and non-scientific digital data, as well as the proliferation of new types of digital content, has led – among many other things – to a lot of innovative work on the concept of the identifier. Digital identifiers have become the key to preserving and accessing content, just as physical identifier tags have been the key to accessing paper-based content and other physical entities for millennia. Two main schools of thought have emerged: on the one hand, librarians and public repositories have pushed the concept of the Persistent Identifier (PI) as a way to guarantee long term identification and (sometimes) access; on the other hand, the extraordinary success of the web has led several researchers and web experts to push the concept of the Cool URI as the universal mechanism for identifying and accessing digital content. Both views have their pros and cons, but so far (with only a few exceptions) the two visions have developed in parallel, sometimes with a subtle underlying hostility.In this paper, we present the evolution of the Entity Name System (ENS), an open service-based platform developed as part of the OKKAM EU co-funded project, which can reconcile these two approaches. The new system, called ENS2.0, is currently under development and will enable data creators and curators to combine the technical strengths and opportunities of the (Semantic) Web vision with the organizational, economical and social requirements legitimately raised by the PI community and stakeholders.

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