What I'm going to describe is a three level abstract architecture.
At top level we find Social Networks. Some of these, with the promotion of Google, are standardizing their own API to expose contents and services. This standardization is known as Open Social API.
Although this common API, people graphs remain partitioned among different social sites.
The complex of social graphs among social sites is what we call Global Social Site.
At bottom level we find a set of users connected together in real life through relations like friendship or work. These people would like to see the set of relationship they own across several social sites as a unique, harmonized graph;
this is the goal of middle level.
Middle level, what we say Global Social Aggregator is able to access content of social sites using generic adapters, like Open Social Adapter, or specific adapters, written to deal with service specific APIs. Access to users data for any network is granted by OpenID common identity or specific sign-on methods. Collected data is then mashed up by a layer called Global Social API, which provides an abstract interface on social relations. Access to social data is then filtered by the Profile Filter, allowing users to define restricted visibility to their resources. The returned graph is finally converted in one of available formats like FOAF, XNF, JSON or even exposed with an Open Social API built on top of it.
Consumers of Middle level are Social Consumers, i.e. anybody having a digital identity in a social network accessible through an OpenID. Social Consumers use Social browsers to access graph data. A social browser is any instrument, being it a service or a desktop application, able to support at least one of the formats provided by converters in middle tier.
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