[rdfweb-dev] Proposal: Names in FoaF

[Joe Tennis]

I've been pondering this one myself, and it seems that one need look 
no further than the name of the ontology for the answer: Friend of a 
Friend.  Effort may well be better spent refining the relationships 
between friends than on who one is. That should be globally available 
in some other RDF Identity document.

In the sense of data abstraction and  normalization, it seems an odd 
place to store personal Identity data. Granted, this may place a 
burden on the newcomer who just wants to FOAF and move on with their 
life; that is, doesn't care to have a zillion RDF files floating all 
over the place. In this case you'd probably import the namespace and 
write the elements from the other spec in the FOAF doc.

I've also been having trouble getting my head around why the <person> 
element (when referring to a friend) has so much data (name and 
email, that is), unless that's meant to be
<This is what I call him/her>, and <the email I use for him/her> 
Though authoritative response can be found here: <seeAlso xxxxxx> Why 
isn't it just:

<friend>
<seeAlso-URL_of_friends_FOAF.rdf>
</friend>

later,
/Joe

At 10:01 AM -0700 4/27/03, Christopher Abiad wrote:
>Forgive me if this is a hugely ignorant comment, but
>hasn't the problem of solving how to represent names
>in a standard way already been solved?
>
>It strikes me that Palm Address Book, Ximian
>Evolution, and many others seem to handle name entry
>in a clean, standardized way.  Why is the vCard spec's
>definition of a name not suitable for FOAF?
>
>http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Data_Formats/Document/Contact/vCard/
>
>--
>Christopher Abiad <chris at ambientvector.com>
>Founder, ambientVector
>
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-- 
Joe Tennis
Information Design Honcho
Joe 10 Group
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