[rdfweb-dev] partly anonymous web communities

[Bernhard A. M. Seefeld]

Hi,

I'm quite new to FOAF and I would like to ask the list wether this is a 
good practice or not:

Given a web-based community of anonymous profiles with descriptions and 
pictures, where each user (each profile) can list friends on this site. 
This looks like great data to publish as FOAF.

The issue is that this community has grown as an anonymous system. I do 
have the user's email address, but it isn't public. FOAF seems to use 
foaf:mbox as the primary way of identifying people. Using the sha1sum 
version of the address is no solution as someone could still guess 
email addresses and then verify that a particular profile corresponds 
to a particular real person. Thus, I would have to generate some pseudo 
mailboxes' sha1sum, like username at site.com, even though mail sent to 
these addresses would never arrive (but nobody would send email there 
as nobody would know the actual addresses used to generate the sha1sum).

Publishing this community in this mode would be just an island in 
foafspace. But I would allow some users the give up anonymity on a 
voluntary basis and then publish both sha1sums, the real addresses' and 
fake addresses'. This would establish some links to the real foafspace. 
And of course, people with a FOAF file outside the community could just 
add this sha1sum and thus tell the foafspiders that he/she is the same 
person as that previously anonymous profile over there.


There are a few things I feel a little bit uneasy about:

This whole "fake-email to generate a unique sha1sum" method seems a 
little awkward. Essentially this would defined the foaf:mbox_sha1sum 
element as a general guid, rather disconnected from the notion of email 
addresses.

This would generate a large number of FOAF profiles of real people 
without a easy way to find the email address (the community allows to 
contact those people through a web interface though, so I don't see 
much problems here).

Some people in this community would have a foaf profile outside and 
would appear as dupes until they give up anonymity in this community 
(very rare now, but that might change someday?).


So what do you think? Would this practice be a good way to populate the 
foafspace or not? What conditions should a web community fulfill to 
participate in this way?
(the site I'm thinking of would be just a few 1'000 profiles (the 
others are not connected), but others might add much more profiles in 
the same way)

    Best Regards,
       Bernhard Seefeld

-----
Bernhard A. M. Seefeld, http://www.bernhardseefeld.ch/