What is Relation Protocol
Relation Protocol is an open source decentralized social graph protocol for encoding relationships on Web3. It creates a blockchain native data layer using semantic SBTs and a standard data format, allowing developers around the world to create decentralized social graphs on the blockchain.
With the protocol, any developer can create features and data types in the social graph layer, allowing users to preserve their social relationships and social network content regardless of application-level changes.
With a decentralized social graph, users now have more autonomy and control over how their social data should be shared and used. This increases participation and satisfaction.
At this point, decentralized societies have yet to emerge. This means that social graph infrastructures need to be open and composite to become the backbone for a decentralized future.
Relation enables this by defining identities and social behaviors in social networks as SBTs, enabling data interoperability between applications and smart contracts, and creating a blockchain-based social graph.
The Relation protocol allows developers to implement their own semantic SBT contracts to scale social graphs.
Graph database technology is used with traditional social networks. It enables efficient search and recommendations. With the Relation protocol, social media data can be linked to graph databases without much trouble.
Relation Protocol supports the RDF standard.
RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a semantic standard used to describe structured knowledge, which is an international standard published by the W3C for knowledge graphs.
The emergence of SBT is related to the creation of personal identification system in Web3. The information generated by such a system has four characteristics.
- The data belong to individuals.
- They are generated by different social actors.
- They are diverse in nature.
- They are generated continuously.
The first three characteristics can be abstracted into a triplet to represent events related to an individual, such as “someone performed certain tasks on a specified date at a specified location” or “a certain institution issued a certificate to someone”. This is an efficient way to standardize and store identity-related information. With the RDF standard, it is possible to turn information from the physical world into machine readable digital data. In other words, by enabling querying, sorting and computing with data, this model serves as a valuable technological and business solution for an identity system.
In Relation Protocol, the social graph consists of social data stored in multiple semantic SBTs in the graph database.
Contracts in the Relation protocol are deployed on the Ethereum or L2 network. Social applications built on the Relation protocol can deploy Semantic SBT contracts for specific scenarios or invoke already developed and deployed contracts.
The schema in the Relation protocol consists of several TTL files stored on Arweave, which are used to constrain the specification of RDF data in Semantic SBT contracts.
Semantic SBTs based on privacy have unique schemas and storage methods, and RDF data of privacy-based SBTs must be encrypted or decrypted using a privacy protocol (e.g., Lit Protocol) before storage, and users manage and control the availability of RDF data.
The protocol uses the ERC-6239 standard as Semantic Soulbound Tokens.
