[rdfweb-dev] Re: <foaf:community>?

[Dan Brickley]

Great question. A quick scribble towards an answer:

FOAF (and RDF generally) separates 'what you can say' from 'who says it'.
FOAF provides the raw materials for the former, and a few ideas a conventions 
for keeping track of the latter.

One trick w.r.t. group membership, might be to follow the foaf:workplaceHomepage example., and do the same for groups more generally conceived.

If I say:
<foaf:Person foaf:name="Dan Brickley">
<foaf:workplaceHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/"/>
</foaf:Person>

...it is a claim that I work for the organisation whose homepage is http://www.w3.org/

In which case, if you are looking to figure out whether I really am 
part of that group, then http://www.w3.org/ might be a good place to start 
hunting for RDF that makes the same claim.

If W3C's home page (or any group, employer etc) had a LINK REL pointing to 
RDF that made the assertions, you have a certain amount of consistency. For 
any URL that is the homepage of a group, you can see who that group thinks 
are its members by looking at the FOAF it links to...

Does that make sense?

Dan (heading off to fiddle with IDE cables and primary paritions and 
boot sectors and suchlike for a while... ugh...)

* Bill Kearney <wkearney99 at h...> <wkearney99 at h...> [2002-12-14 18:24-0000]
> I'm wondering about how to express authoritative participation in a 
> entity? How should it be made clear that someone 'belongs' to a 
> group? Is it by their own assertion? By the group authority? 
> 
> There are some really subtle issues about how people handle 
> expression of being part or not part of any number of different 
> grouping concepts. Think social circles or cliques, not department 
> employee rosters. 
> 
> Right now foaf makes no attempt to be authoritative. This is not a 
> bad thing. But it does seem like having a way to be more precise is 
> going to be important to some folks.
> 
> As for indicating group hierarchies and related-ness, there are 
> Dublin Core elements and RDF schema constructs that could be 
> considered. 
> 
> -Bill Kearney
> 
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