[rdfweb-dev] partly anonymous web communities

[Danny Ayers]

I'd say : bring 'em on in!

It's an interesting case. I think both the people involved and the FOAF
world would benefit.

Something like the 'nick' should be enough on the human side. On the machine
side, I'd suggest creating an id from whatever your system uses for unique
IDs, and include these as a property like foaf:aimChatID etc. People are
already identified within FOAF in a fashion that is anonymous on the web : a
foaf:Person doesn't (ever?) have a URI. I think it's absolutely consistent
to allow people to be part of FOAF networks without their human-world
identifiers being visible, as long as they can be uniquely identified
somehow. The property could be defined in your own namespace, though I
wonder if there's a need for a general miscID or something in FOAF itself?

Cheers,
Danny.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rdfweb-dev-bounces at vapours.rdfweb.org
> [mailto:rdfweb-dev-bounces at vapours.rdfweb.org]On Behalf Of Bernhard A.
> M. Seefeld
> Sent: 02 July 2003 16:06
> To: rdfweb-dev at vapours.rdfweb.org
> Subject: [rdfweb-dev] partly anonymous web communities
>
>
> 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/
>
>
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