foaf use case: vegetarian / airline bookings

[Dan Brickley]

It should be possible to expose one's vegetarianism via FOAF.

eg by using the class http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Vegetarian

I've often thought this (yes, usually when checking in for some 
flight while they're saying "You should have told us earlier, we may not 
have many vegatarian meals left on this flight". 

Wordnet also has a class Vegan. I don't think it has the same categories
(eg. lacto, asian etc) that airlines use to distinguish the different 
flavours of vegetarianism.

Anyway, it'd be sweet if travel agents etc could, since they know your name etc., 
do a quick check of your FOAF file during booking and say "there's a Web record of a 
Dan Brickley who is a vegetarian, might that be you? should we book a vege meal 
for this flight?" or somesuch.

The markup is easy, just add

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Vegetarian"/>

or

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Vegan"/> 

...directly inside the main Person entry within a FOAF document.


While this may (ahem) cater for computing types who fly too much in their work, 
it seems both useful, and simple. Just wanted to get it written down at least.

Dan