Bartering

[Bill Kearney]

> it strikes me that the foafAuction variant of foafShop would be a good
> (and not too difficult project) to set up. it incorporates all of the
> foafShop ideas with regard to matching buyers and sellers as well as
> having an explicit way for developing trust.

I greatly dislike the idea of grafting this into the foaf namespace. At what
point will we have foaf:kitchenSink? It's a fine case for developing another
schema and a use case for it's application in foaf.

> eBay itself has been something we've been talking about as a project
> to try the trustBot type exercises with. a foafAuction would be nicer
> because it would allow users to assign more extensive trust
> relationships than the eBay positive or negative feedback.

I agree, just not as a foaf namespace element directly. And perhaps for another
reason, grafting all this into a foaf document ends up making it a huge mess.
Wouldn't it be better to rdf:resource to something that contained other auction
items? This would, of course, require grafting on some sort of identifying URI
in the foaf that indicated it's a chunk of 'stuff' from that other namespace.
I'm not exactly sure how I'd go about doing that, however. The RSS folks have
tackled a bit of this with the mod_link module but it's less than perfect.

-Bill Kearney