Right. So, in the never ending struggle that is RDF, foaf:group is
another property that's a "work in progress". Here are some notes:
In the spec, foaf:Group is a container of foaf:Agents (of which
foaf:Person is a subclass). It's ideal for representing groups of
anything, from companies to mailing lists to knitting clubs.
My particular issue is you can make a "group" FOAF file, in which
the group describes all it's members, but there's no easy way
for a "person" FOAF file to say that it's a member of a group.
Now, that seems a bit complicated. I can parse it and fish around
for the right way of looking at things, but wouldn't something like
this make more sense:
So foaf:memberOf would have a domain of foaf:Person (foaf:Agent?)
and a range of rdf:resource that points to the "authoritative" group
file that has all the other info in it (join dates, membership
classes, etc.).
(side rant: Here's where a really sticky part of FOAF which
confuses the hell out of some, and others ignore. Where do I go to
talk about this / suggest things? The Issue Tracker?
The wiki? The IRC
channel? The mailing list?
The project web site? The
weblog? Too many tools!)
So, what am I forgetting? Does this make sense? And if it doesn't
make sense, how would you go about representing that
a foaf:Person is a part of a group without the group FOAF file?[esigler.2nw.net/blog]
I will be reposting this to the rdfweb list. But Eric's right
- there are too many places to. But that's whty they call it
'open'. If there were only one, and someone controled it, then you'd
complain that it was closed. This anarchistic way of adding
features to FOAF is kind of fun.
But the big test will be once Eric launches the next version of PeopleAggregator (next week -
right?) at which point, we have to ask the existing world of FOAF -
which is basically Typepad and Ecademy and a bunch of research/open
projects - to update their definition of FOAF to include foaf:topic -
so we can define a FOAF file as being MY FOAF file.
Google Groups vs Yahoo! Groups05/14/2004 07:37 PM Search Engine Positioning and Web Marketing weblog,CA-9 hours
agoGoogle has just launched a beta version of Google Groups 2 an
extension of the current Google Groups that is does not only include
Usenet but is similar in ...
Does social software matter? - Posted by David
Weinberger at 10:05 AM
There’s some back-and-forth at StartUpSkills.com on whether social software will amount to
much. Jeremy Zawodny says: “Start thinking
about how adding a social networking component to existing systems
could improve them.” StartUpSkills replies that people
don’t have enough incentive to give away the social network that
is their competitive advantage.
Personally, I agree with Jeremy that networks such as LinkedIn will
only survive if an external application figures out a use for them.
Without that, we’re left with people you don’t know asking
you to hook them up with other people you don’t know.
Om Malik doesn’t understand why people
would share their Rolodexes with commercial entities. My problem,
though, isn’t that my Rolodex is too valuable to share (hah!),
but that social software of the Friendster/LinkedIn sort necessarily
get social relationships wrong:
First, social relationships aren’t transitive: If A knows B
who knows C who knows D, there is no sense in
which A knows C much less D. We do, however,
have a social convention for first degree relationships: A is entitled
to ask B for an introduction to C. But not to
D.
Second, social relationships aren’t formal (in the logical
sense). In logic, if A > B and B > C, then A > C. But — and
here’s why people generally don’t name their kids A, B and C — A
doesn’t have to ask B’s permission to be greater than C, and C doesn’t get annoyed at B for pestering
her with requests from strangers to be greater than C. Every time I introduce someone to my pal C, I am altering my relationship with C just a
little bit.
Third, real social networks are always implicit. The ones
constructed explicitly are always — yes, always — infected
with a heavy dose of social bullshit. It’s like thinking that the
invitiation list for your wedding actually reflects your circle of
friends and relatives. No, you had to invite Barry-the-Boozer because
he’s your cousin and you couldn’t invite Marsha because then
you’d have to invite her husband Larry-the-Ass-Grabber and her
daughter Erin-the-Snot-Flinger. Explicitly constructed social networks
not only lack the differentiation that makes relationships real, they
are falsehoods built to reinforce spectral relationships and to avoid
ending shaky ones.
There may be uses for the links created within these artificial
social networks, for while the relationships aren’t transitive,
some of their properties — interests, tastes, prejudices —
are: if A and C both know B, they are
statistically more likely to share B’s tastes in music than two
randomly selected people are. That may turn out to be useful to some
other application.
But if you want to get at the real social networks, you’re
going to have to figure them out from the paths that actual feet have
worn into the actual social carpet.
Oh boy, finally an intellectual rap I can sink my teeth into!
And from somebody no less esteemed as the good Doctor
Weinberger.
You see, I tried to invite David into Friendster early on and was
refuted by him, scoffing at the notion of implicit social nets - so
I've had 9 months to ponder this issue.
First off - I totally agree with him that explicit social nets are
infected with bullshit. I myself proved that by quickly gaining
444 so-called friends on Tribe.net. I've drawn the line at 444
(since it's such a nice number) and as I add friends, I take away
accordingly - to keep the number at 444. How's that for
arbitrary? :-)
I know this pisses off danah boyd, but that's life. It all
seems like bullshit to me, so what's wrong with gaming the
system? (This is from a person (ME!) who met his wife on
Match.com BTW :-) Lisa (my wife) and I had totally figured out
Match - as we both spent over three years trolling around, looking for
each other.
Only until we more or less gave up and just saw it for what it was
- did we suceed.
But all these math formulas somehow trying to prove that I don't
care or don't have the right to ask D for a date or sell him/her
something is bullshit too! Sometimes I think that the good
Doctor is just an old crumudgeon and that 'his generation' just don't
get it.
If you wanna have fun on-line and you wanna use technology - then
why not ask out D for a date? Or try to do business with
her? As opposed to what? Sitting at home watching bloggers
blog the Mars landing?
What's more fun - reading RSS feeds or flirting with
strangers? If an explicit social net can give me the excuse of
meeting hotties from Knoxville, TN or Banglore (for that matter) then
what's wrong with that?
I for one - COMPLETEY UTTERLY - believe that by
adding social networking, to say 'a gaming portal' or a content play
(like Tony Perkins 'AlwaysOn
Network') - we're about to push the envelope even further -
developing spontaneously forming groups of like minded people.
And anything that helps people hang out together, in a decentralized
world, is a good thing. How else are we supposed to form the World of Ends?
But another thing I TOTALLY EMPHATICALLY AGREE
with the good doctor (and Om
Malik), is that there's no value - to ME - in giving some system
all my personal poop, friends, info, etc. - unless I can use it
elsewhere. This is what I tried to explain to Reid Hoffman when I
first found out about LinkedIn. This is also why - every
chance I get I ask Reid - in public - if he plans on 'opening up'
LinkedIn - to allow, say a FOAF file to move these social nets -
elsewhere.
It's up to entrprenuers to figure this challenge out.
How can we, on one hand, develop IP, assets and business models
which can make money, while on the other hand - not lock people into
yet another lock-in strategy? That's what Jonathan Abrams, John
Doerr and Friendster is all about. Lock in.
I just hope that Reid Hoffman and Mark
Pincus are smarter than that.
:-)
That's why our PeopleAggregator is being
developed - to provide away for folks to move their social
networks around. And that's why FOAF is right on! It's the perfect
format for that reason - it's not controlled by anyone, it's open and
it's already in use (in products like Ecademy
and Typepad.)
In answer to Tom's question "what won't we do with FOAF" I can say
that FOAF does not include authentication, security or privacy
controls. It is up to each vendor, developer and system to
provide those features.
FOAF is simply an object wrapper around whatever profile data you
wish to store. Any kind of unique identifier can be inside a
FOAF file. FOAF is just a stnadard way of FINDING profile data,
which is then addressed and pointed to - in a standard way.
That's it.
A Little Bit of FOAF
A Little Bit of FOAF12/29/2003 11:43 PM Peter Rukavina of Reinvented.net recently pointed me to a Quicktime
video of Ben Hammersley's RDF presentation at the Danish "reboot"
Conference. I'd like to recommend the presentation, too. Even if
you've got a decent understanding of XML namespaces and triplets and
the mythic potential of (don't throw anything) the semantic Web, the
Hammersley talk offers digestible ways of describing the damned thing
to others.
’Course, I couldn't just watch the video....
Some interesting discussion has been triggered by Jon Udell's
comments on FOAF. I agree with Edd and Dan that FOAF is about more than
social networking and have said as much here on several occasions.
Personally I see two problems with FOAF neither of them big.
Firstly the name causes people to adopt certain expectations about
it's intended usage particularly with general surge of interest (fad?)
in social software. I certainly wouldn't advocate a name change but,
as the exchange with Udell has demonstrated, we need to take care to
present FOAF correctly.
The second problem is just about data. Because there is no central
repository of FOAF data, it's harder to create FOAF applications: you
either need to run a scutter yourself to collect up what's available,
or generate FOAF out of the back-end of another site. Of course you
can also hang out on #foaf and badger someone (e.g. Jim Ley or Matt
Biddulph) to give you a data export; that's what I did.
I firmly believe that playing with the FOAF data that's out in the
wild will generate the most interesting applications, and provide
essential implementation feedback on the vocabulary itself.
So I'm going to try encouraging folk to regularly and visibly
publish the results of their scutter runs. An "offical" data set hung
of the FOAF homepage would also be useful. This should hopefully
encourage the development of more FOAF applications.
Incidentally I mentally classify those applications as follows:
FOAF-generating -- e.g. FOAF-a-Matic, ecademy, TypePad,
etc. Applications that generate FOAF but don't typically process it to
perform any useful function. These are an important step in producing
a critical mass of data
FOAF-gathering -- e.g. a Scutter, FOAFbot, FOAFnaut.
Applications that harvest the web of FOAF data to build a data
repository. Functionality is then built around this repository
FOAF-consuming -- e.g. FOAF explorer/viewer, Dashboard,
Planet RDF. Applications that read specific FOAF data, to fulfill some
function. FOAF-gathering applications also typically consume data in
this way -- to manually refresh their repository -- but I'm thinking
of slightly different application scenarios, e.g. automating web site
registration and preference maintenance, generating a project or
community blog, etc.
For me this classification separates out some of the implementation
issues: a FOAF-consuming application doesn't typically have to worry
about attribution, trust, etc. The data is coming from a limited
number of sources. FOAF-gathering applications have to deal with a
much more difficult set of problems. [Lost Boy]
[etech] FOAF
[etech] FOAF02/11/2004 08:25 PM Dan Brickley is explaining Friend of a Friend. (I had a chance to
talk with him about this yesterday in a hallway.) It's an XML standard
that allows people to express information about themselves...the sorts
of things you might say on your homepage. There are currently 2M FOAF
descriptions in the world. There are different styles of FOAF files.
You can be very explicit about relationships: "Jane is my arch
nemesis." But there's also a more implicit, evidence-based approach:
Libby and I went to the same school and work for the same
organization. ("I lean toward this one," says...
This is cool. I asked Tim O'Reilly at one
of the press conferences at Etech - how he thought we could jumpstart
and fund many of these open source projects.
His answer was "let the free marketplace decide."
So THIS TipJar idea is one of the ways we can do this. Affero is another.
An Introduction to FOAF
An Introduction to FOAF02/10/2004 02:49 AM Friend-of-a-friend, FOAF, is an RDF vocabulary for machine-readable
homepages. It enables the expression of decentralized social networks
akin to the centralized ones seen in Friendster and Orkut. Leigh Dodds
provides an introduction to FOAF and its use.
As a programmer working with FOAF and writing a
sizeable application centered around FOAF and the FOAF specification I
cannot help but marvel that this specification has been so widely
adopted. FOAF as it stands is difficult at best to work with and deal
with. RDF by nature is fluid and allows anyone to just hack up
anything into it. FOAF is just some basic guidelines for saying "This
is who I am!" but it is missing some very large and very key parts to
become a true social networking centerpiece. I am going to explain
in a second, but in order to do what I have set out to do here, I have
"add" some things to FOAF in the form of modules, I have to bet that
people will follow them as a standard. This is a tough idea to go
forward with.
One: FOAF is missing a way to be centralized, I
understand this was part of the bargin with FOAF and a lot of people
are hardcore against it, but there is not even a way in the current
specification to 'set' a centralized server, location, website,
anything how do we know which of your thirty foaf files is the
authorative and most recently updated file?
Two: FOAF has not
implemented private/public files, FOAF needs a way to have a private
file so I can email all my FOAF "knows" people (people I say I know)
and a public file that you can view who I know and see how I fit
in.
Three: Any shmuck can toss me in his "knows" statements,
this links that person to me. A lot of people will say "so what" well,
how about this; John Carmack (the creator of games like Quake and
Doom) creates a FOAF file, then every Quake player in the country
decides that they want to be linked to Mr. Carmack (and believe me,
they will.. just look at who links to his .plan file). So now pDNS has
to sort through 30k users who state they "know" this guy. So, who
really 'KNOWS' this guy and who is authorative for knowing this guy. I
mean obviously we would want to let his developers say they "know"
him, his employees etc. And, furthermore "How" do they know him? Are
they a "Fan" an actual "Friend" or a coworker?
Four: There are
no defined "groups" (which like mailing lists: read, yahoo groups
etc..) that are strictly defined. Why? Part of what makes up a
structure is the definition of groups of people, right now it is
free-for-all and is basically impossible to determine peoples actual
groupings. It is like social incest and is difficult to determine how
all the people are actually linked.
So, I have some complaints,
I also have 'proposed' solutions (or I would not have brought up my
gripes) that I would like to hear back from people on.
My goals
in pDNS are simple. Allow people full control over their profile,
implement ttl's in foaf profiles so they are not pinged all the time
(save bandwidth), add timestamps of last updated so we can tell which
is newer and therefore the more accurate. Add in some structure on
where to find the authorative file, either on our servers or on
theirs. Add in methods through the pDNS system so that you can set
your profile so that people cannot be simply adding you left and
right. You can set your profile to always allow people to add you and
add them back, always allow them to add but 'not' add them back, never
allow people to add you, or you can moderate additons. Set up
'groups' of people that have moderators, this way if you run some
site, say "computerfreak" and all your users can join your group, this
will link them in as a user and makes doing private mailing lists for
your users easy.
These are just some ideas that I am mulling
over as I look at an apparent free-for-all mess that is the current
state of FOAF data. I also understand why it has not been universally
adopted due to the issues stated above and others.
My point is,
look at the success of things like ICQ and yahoo groups, think about
why they are adopted so widely and have so many people that swear by
them.
Anyway, feedback would be appreciated, any thoughts or
ideas/solutions you may have.
Word press has been getting a lot of word in the press about being
"the" replacement package for MT. However, by default, there's no FOAF
input or output, and that's never a good thing.
So, I present to those of you who may be switching, a presentable
version of FOAF for WordPress. Basic, as it only spits out the values
that you can set in wp-admin: admittedly minimal. However, it is
something. Anyway, I figured some of you might be switching over -
mortenf, specifically, asked for some help on the topic.
So,
http://crschmidt.net/w
phack/profile2.txt is how to set up a
profile page - and FOAF - in your WordPress blog. I'll be
working with the wordpress developers to clean this up and get it into
the Core version of wordpress, but not until after the 1.2 release, as
they've got enough on their hands as is.
Back to techy issues. RAP is a FOAF parser in php which we're
using for the PeopleAggregator.
OOOps - until we started building bigger stuff (the PeoplesDNS) and
it broke. The folks at Drupal also didn't want an inefficient
piece of software in their builds, so....
Joel De Gan is writing a new one. Optimized, kick ass, open
source.
:-)
Here's his post!
Real programmers
don't RAP. (I am going to apologize in advance for all
tongue-in-cheek remarks in the following.. I just can't help myself
this morning)
Real programmers don't RAP
Besides the obvious lack of rhythm and soundtrack.. We just
don't have scantily clad women following us around who like to be
called bitch, we also don't own a copy of that bass track that the
rappers are so fond of and is used in every rap song.
Anyway.. Chris wrote a good review for real-life programming and
attempts to use the RAP RDF parser for work in the real world here. I would
like it stated that I have no issue with RAP (besides the fact that I
don't live in a ghetto so it just does not speak to me) but there is
that old addage of trying to make everyone happy and ending up not
making anyone happy.
Why do something so complex when it can
be done simply? I think it is an application that is proof of why
modular programming is such a good thing. Does it 'really' need to be
that big? I can understand that for those monster medical RDF's it
might be the perfect thing, I get that and by all means use it for
that, but for parsing simple RDF files it just does not stack
up.
These guys had scalability issues with RAP, the reality in
trying to use it "they were being called 'bitch' and getting slapped
around". So we took some code cobbled together from comments posted on
php.net, a little hacking around by me and have them a small (very
small) single file parser that can do the job in a tenth of the time.
When dealing with hundreds of thousands of files, that is kind of
important as the latency adds up and becomes apparent to an
application very fast.
Not too mention, it took me a little
less than twenty minutes from start to finish to have them something
workable here is the
proof (05:58:20-06:14:39) from the new #pa logging bot I set
up.
Anyway in summary; programmers have no music talent, we
generally don't have scantily clad women doing the 'booty dance'
around us and RAP is not suited well for parsing FOAF because it
suffers from bloat and for small apps and small (i.e. < 40k) RDF
files it is overkill.
One note, we do share one thing with
rappers.. I have known a lot of programmers who are obsessed with guns
and who blow huge amounts of money on really dumb
stuff..
I spent allot of money in the 90's, but not on dumb stuff. I
was investing in DLAs.
Now that I've met Joel I can safely say that open source does work.
This MT 3.0 is gonna bring the issues to the front burner. And
the PeoplesDNS (as the perfect
complement to the PeopleAggregator) will also gateway and bridge
between every digital ID system out there.
So for all you Drupal lovers and suppoters out there we have a
question for you......
"What sort of relationships would you like to see established
between DSrupal members? Should we create really specific kind
of relationships, like Project Colleague or more general ones, like
friend - or both?"
We need to know as we're extending the drupal.profile module to
import/export FOAF and........
..... Drupal currently doesn't grok more than just you.
The FOAFnet is about to show
working FOAF interchange between systems liek Tribe, Ecademy, Orkut,
Drupal, LiveJournal and..... [insert your system here.]
In 1995, he was sending his
friends in San Francisco e-mail messages with lists of local events.
With their encouragement, this became Craig's List, which has now
expanded to Boston, Seattle, New York and 19 other regions. Nine years
later, Craig's List now gets 500 million page views and 4 million
unique visitors every month. The staff numbers 14, and the site runs
on about 30 Linux boxes. Craig says his success is based on "a culture
of trust." When I asked about his business model, he just laughed.
A self-described nerd, Craig has become somewhat of an
international celebrity. He has been asked by San Francisco
mayor-elect Gavin Newsom to join the mayor's transition team. "In San
Francisco City, people have given up because they seem to feel that
their leadership has told them that it doesn't matter if they're doing
a good job. It doesn't matter that much if they get things done."
Craig's mission -- should he decide to accept it -- is to recommend
how the use of computer systems and the Internet can better serve the
public. "So far, it looks pretty good," he says.
And coming soon to a theatre near you -- no kidding -- "24 Hours on
Craig's List." That's right -- the movie! Look for it to premiere at
South by Southwest or the San Francisco International Film Festival.
[IT
Conversations]
OK I got just one question: "It's been over six months
since the Tribe appeared - aiming right
at Craigslist and their Listings service. So how long will it be till
Craigslist support FOAF and opens up to the world?"
Leigh brings up Eric
Vitiello's Relationship Scehma which enables finer granual
levels of realtionships - than just friend or not. That's so
black and white.
That's exactly what our PeopleAggregator.com social
network does! It allows for defining 7 levels of
realtionship:
- close friend
- friend
- acquaintance
- know by reputation
- know in passing
- don't know at all, but want to know
- related
This is what I'll be talking about and showing at Etech.
BTW PeopleAggregator is
being created by Eric Sigler - and he sure could use some help. It's
completely open source and available on SourceForge as PeepAgg.
I just heard from Paul Martino, the CTO and Founder of Tribe.net that they were working on
FOAF and RSS support for Tribe. Cool. There are going to be a lot of
issues such as privacy, but I think that having companies like Tribe
seriously working on FOAF will bring these issues front and center and
make some of these theoretical discussions very concrete and
productive.
The FOAF project is based around
the use of machine readable Web homepages for people, groups,
companies and other kinds of thing. To achieve this they use the "FOAF
vocabulary" to provide a collection of basic terms that can be used in
these Web pages. At the heart of the FOAF project is a set of
definitions designed to serve as a dictionary of terms that can be
used to express claims about the world. The initial focus of FOAF has
been on the description of people, since people are the things that
link together most of the other kinds of things they describe in the
Web: they make documents, attend meetings, are depicted in photos, and
so on. The FOAF Vocabulary definitions presented here are written
using a computer language (RDF/OWL) that makes it easy for software to
process some basic facts about the terms in the FOAF vocabulary, and
consequently about the things described in FOAF documents. A FOAF
document, unlike a traditional Web page, can be combined with other
FOAF documents to create a unified database of information. This has
been added to World Wide Web
Reference Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.
The FOAF autocreation script
takes two links - one to your current FOAF file and one to your OPML
blogroll - and produces a brand new FOAF file for you. How? By
crawling through the sites in your blogroll looking for autodiscovery
links and combining any data it finds with the <foaf erson> data from your existing FOAF file.
Though I'm not credited on the web page, I did have something to do
with coming up with this new concept called MeNowDocument.
Really I'm just the cheerleader/marketing guy and it was Joel De Gan, Chris Schmidt
and B.K. DeLong. MeNowDocument is to
Presence what PersonalProfileDocument is to
About Me pages.
Chris Schmidt has now been working with that schema recently.
he has some interesting insights below about......well just take a
read. BTW Joel is also the guy working on the PeoplesDNS, who created some new kind of
filters recently and who is implementing the php version of the
FOAFnet APIs.
:-)
Here's Chris' post....
Metadata
, the quick and easy way. One of the biggest problems with FOAF is that it's difficult for
people to use quickly and easily. Even with the FOAF-A-Matic or
other similar tools, designed to make creation of RDF data simpler,
take a concentrated amount of time to use to create good
information.
Lately, I'd been playing with the menow schema that Joel
and a couple other people interested in FOAF came up with. The basic
idea behind it is to be able to describe yourself at the moment - an
instantaneous description of what you're doing. This fits in along
with other projects that I've worked on, such as Dashboard, where it
tells you more about what you're doing on the computer at the moment.
For example, a menowdocument could describe the fact that I'm out
driving with Jess, with a goal GPS destination: something that FOAF
typically doesn't do.
The MeNowDocument could be the first
step towards solving Neil's Where was Social
Networking? issue - how to connect the people better. The first
step towards connecting is getting the information in a way that
agents can understand it - and if both agents understand "late night,
10pm", then you're on your way.
Tired of all the problems
related to creating these things by hand, I wrote two bots, both
connected to the same backend for storage information. One bot hangs
out on IRC - in #pa, on irc.freenode.net. The other is on AIM:
menowbot.
These two bots aren't all that complex - in fact, the
next step will be to add a bit more complexity, in creating the
ability to alias different personalities together. The code for the
bots is available at http://crschmidt.net/pa/menow/ . However, what they do do is set up an easy way to add
information to a database without having to think about it much. It's
not completely simple yet - and it's not particularly complete, cause
you can add any predicate you want. However, for those people who just
want something to hang onto their data for them as a reminder to
others - something perfect for the quick "hm, remember this" note.
A quick transcript to demonstrate:
<crschmidt>
menow, menow? <menow> crschmidt : menow:mood = tired at
2004-06-01 19:17:33 menow:browsing = http://schema.peoplesdns.co
m/menow/ at 2004-06-01 19:17:33 < crschmidt>
menow, forget browsing <crschmidt> menow,
menow? <menow> crschmidt : menow:mood = tired at 2004-06-01
19:17:33 <crschmidt> menow, add writing dc:description post
about the bot <crschmidt> menow, menow? <menow>
crschmidt : menow:writing = dc:description post about the bot at
2004-06-01 20:50:35 menow:mood = tired at 2004-06-01
19:17:33
Of course, no bot like this would be complete without
the ability to browse other people:
<crschmidt> menow,
crschmidt now? <menow> crschmidt : menow:writing =
dc:description post about the bot at 2004-06-01 20:50:35 menow:mood =
tired at 2004-06-01 19:17:33
Lots of interesting uses, and I
plan to keep developing it, but I believe in "release early, release
often." So, here's version 0.1.
I'm here in a quaint university town named Galway, Ireland - which
is Europe's furthest west city. It's got some old Spanish ruins and
lots of frsh faced Irish semantic engineers.
Our hosts are SWAD
and DERI - and there are loads
of semantic web/W3C types here - all discussing how they're using FOAF.
OK - so one of the first complaints I get about FOAF is
privacy. And I blindly just keep repeating the mantra: "each
system is repsonsible for their own security." And then someone
asks "do you think everyone will want their FOAF files sent around"
and I reply "then don't put anything into your FOAF you don't want
others to know about".
OK - so I'm sitting here - waiting for the results of two FOAF
based systems to sucessfully import and export FOAF files between each
other - and others have said "we can just spider and scarf" - just
like any other red-blooded web developer.
And I answer "yes - but we want to get the end-user involved in all
this".
So this morning I get an invite into a new
system - called AskMyNetwork.com - truly a YASNS. But this one's got
some twists. It's a recommendation (read: reputation) network,
enabling folks to recomend services, people, restaurants, etc.
And it (apparently) has scarfed up a bunch fo FOAF and they're using
it for..... well let me tell you how.
1. So I'm looking around this YASNS and there's a button that
says:
You have at least 48
potential connections - users that the network believes
you already know, but haven't added to your connections list
yet.
2. So I click on it - and sure enough, there's good old Mr.
Joi Ito. "Ah" - I say, someone warm and fuzzy. So I click
on it - and the system asks me for Joi's email. Huh?
3. Now wait a minute - how did they know a) that I
know Joi and b) that they DON'T know Joi's
email......
4. Hmmmmm - there was also a long list of 48 other people
there. Hmmmmmm. Think. Think.
5. Oh shit - they scarfed a FOAF file from
somewhere (I think it's the set of FOAFs I have on Phil
Pearson's TopicExchange!
Ouch - now I have to eat my own dogfood!
6. Solution? Give the end-user the explicit control
over exporting FOAF. That's what the FOAFnet is going to do.
7. So Dom Ramsey - if you're reading this - please make
AskMyNetwork.com a FOAFnet compliant site and work with us to make ALL
FOAF based sites adhere to these simple rules.....
A) No one's FOAF is exported without their explicit permission.
B) No one gets bothered if they don't provide their email - get the
hint!
C) Please stop collecting FOAF files as if they're little trophies
to be put up on a mantle and admired.
-----
Next week I'l critique the entire premise of AskMyNetwork and why
these recommendations should be locked up inside some data silo -
or set free - and placed onto open servers.
-----
Epilog - they do have some coolio animated gifs though........
Format Offering
Applications, Finally: I'd heard of Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF)
before, but there was no penetration, so I didn't pay it much
attention. But now that TypePad includes FOAF by default, well, now
you have penetration.
And now that thousands of these FOAF files have been built
by TypePad, along with many more built manually by users of Movable
Type and other tools, we're starting to see some of the first
applications emerge around the nascent standard.
Brian Kelly takes a look at
the FOAF Semantic Web application and suggests it is time to start
evaluating this technology. The term FOAF stands for Friend of a
Friend. As might be deduced from this phrase one of the key
applications of FOAF is to provide a mechanism for creating links to
one's friends. From the links to one's immediate circle of friends
automated software can be used to process links from your friends,
which can provide a visualisation of 'friends of a friend'. FOAF is a
Semantic Web application which can be used to provide personal
information in a form suitable for automated processing. On a page
created in HTML Web authors often provide personal information, such
as contact details, interests, etc. Such information is ideally suited
for reading but cannot easily be repurposed by automated tools. FOAF
was designed to enable such information to be provided in a form which
could not only be displayed as conventional Web page content but also
to be used for automated processing. The FOAF Semantic Web application
has been added to the Semantic Web Research section of Deep Web Research Subject
Tracer™ Information Blog. It also has been added to my posting
on Online Social Networks.
Groups! Help!
Groups! Help!03/21/2003 10:21 AM At the O'Reilly conference on emerging technology I agreed to talk
about "the future of groups." How the hell would I know? So, I'm
turning to you. I just want enough to stimulate a discussion, so all I
need from you is 20 minutes worth of brilliant insights that are
staggeringly fresh, indisputable, and vastly amusing. Here are the
sorts of things I've been thinking about: The Eskimos may have 35
words for snow (they don't, and they're not called Eskmos any more),
but we have 100 words for groups. (Note, we also have 100 words for
dirt.) But we...
In last week's column, I suggested that individuals and
corporations should be the authoritative sources of basic
information about
themselves. That way, if an application needs my name, address, and
phone
number, I can refer it to a source that I control and guarantee to
be correct.
But how many applications really need my name, address, and phone
number?
Capturing the identity of individuals, along with personal
information about
them, has become a habit. In a climate of increasing concern about
privacy,
it's a bad habit we must learn to resist. [Full story at
InfoWorld.com]
As I mention in this week's column, the notion of selective
disclosure is a
core value of
href="http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/">Shibboleth, an Internet2
project
that's gaining some real traction in the higher-ed world.
What's up with the name 'Shibboleth'? Here's the scoop:
A shibboleth is a kind
of
linguistic password: A way of speaking (a pronunciation, or the use
of a
particular expression) that identifies one as a member of an 'in'
group. The
purpose of a shibboleth is exclusionary as much as inclusionary: A
person
whose way of speaking violates a shibboleth is identified as an
outsider and
thereby excluded by the group. (This phenomenon is part of the
"Judge a book
by its cover" tendency apparently embedded in human cognition, and
the use of
language to distinguish social groups).
The story behind the
word is
recorded in the biblical Book of Judges. The word shibboleth in
ancient Hebrew
dialects meant 'ear of grain' (or, some say, 'stream'). Some groups
pronounced
it with a sh sound, but speakers of related dialects pronounced it
with an s.
[Suzanne
Kemmer]
The federated identity system called
Shibboleth deals
with group membership, rather than individual identity. It's
interesting to
think about use cases, outside higher ed, that don't require the
identification
of individuals. Consider website registration. The New York Times, or InfoWorld, or other
media
sites that want to qualify readers to their advertisers, don't really
need to
know me as an individual. They just need to aggregate readers into
groups. From
the Times' perspective, I'm a member of the group of American male
writers who
work in Media/Publishing/Broadcasting and who read the Times regularly
but do
not subscribe. From InfoWorld's perspective, I'm a member of the group
of
consultants (Technical) working in the area of Tech: Publishing who
strategize
about (but do not directly purchase) IT assets.
What if it were possible -- and convenient -- to affiliate with
these groups
without giving up personally identifying information? In reaction to
registration regimes that are too granular, the bugmenot.c
om
hack abolishes granularity. But maybe there's a middle ground.
It seems that the past year
hasn't been wasted - as FOAF is coming into focus on many people's
radars.
This is a great 
erson> data from your existing FOAF file.
OK - so one of the first complaints I get about FOAF is
privacy. And I blindly just keep repeating the mantra: "each
system is repsonsible for their own security." And then someone
asks "do you think everyone will want their FOAF files sent around"
and I reply "then don't put anything into your FOAF you don't want
others to know about".