[rdfweb-dev] FOAF browsing and FOAFster

[Jim Ley]

"Marc Canter" <marc at broadbandmechanics.com>

>                   a) Is there now a concept - or has there even been any
> discussion on 'groups' of friends?

There's been plenty of discussion, but no concrete proposals yet exist for
describing groups.

>                   e) What is the (RDF)Web's version of a home page?

A homepage is pretty much all of them, a homepage has a good understanding
with people I think, although I'm surprised there's no dictionary
definitions of it.

>                               - it's confusing now - and confusion isn't
> a good thing.  And is it assumed that the page that displays the
> FOAFicon - is THE page where the embedded FOAF (or at least pointer to
> the RDF) is?

You can put pointers to the RDF whereever you want, in any page, or every
page, if you put an icon, then it's probably a good idea to, but it makes
little difference.

>                               - SO what I'd like to understand is "why
> not a combination of centralized & decentralized?"

This is what we have, foafbot, foaf : webview, and foafnaut all maintain
these aggregrated content where you can go find out info about people, as
the foafspace grows, crawls that instead of doing the whole universe as now,
will have to start crawling smaller areas and linking between them, but it
exists already, in a number of tools.

>     - verifying one's friend list
>     - sending out invites - to become friends

Any tool that emails me to ask permission to become a friend would be
extremely unwelcome and would lose a lot of goodwill I have to the foaf
universe.  If people want to say they're a friend of mine, great, that's
little to do with me, I certainly don't need to know about it. Friendship
doesn't have to be reciprocal, because we all have different ideas of
friendship means, in any case, the relationship is knows, not friendsWith.

A couple of months back, I walked into a hostel 6000 miles from home, and I
guy went "Are you Jim Ley", and proceeded to tell me all sorts of things
about my life, and people I knew, he clearly knew me, yet I didn't have a
clue who he was. [*] - There's nothing wrong he saying he knows me, and
there's nothing wrong with me not agreeing with it, that's the reality we're
modeling, and it allows us to distinguish between the important information
that both people know each other.

In the foaf-world, I only "know" people who I've shared a drink with, online
interaction isn't really enough, that doesn't mean there aren't people out
there who I'd do much the same I would for a friend (trust an introduction
from, do favours for etc.) but for me, I feel it's important to have
actually met them.

>     - and dispensed with the nonsense of having to manually
> update/emerge the rdf - each time a change is made!

This is exactly what the mirroring would have to do, you'd have to ping the
mirroring software, so I fail to see what's gained.  The current
aggregrators already expose recently found/updated foaf docs:
http://jibbering.com/foaf/recent.1 or
http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/scutter.rss - the aggregrators share these,
ping one, the others find it, don't ping at all, the others find it a little
slower - I don't really see how important it is to get the information out
their real time - when foaf is on the desktop, that's never going to happen.

>    - need a basic utility to validate the FOAF file

http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator

>    - present a personal 'portal' type interface where one could
> display links, RSS channels, reviews,
> conversations - sort of a complement to their blog - or act as the
> blog's "About me." page..

What value would this add to me, why do I want to exist on some portal?

Cheers,

Jim.

* We went to school together apparently - either that or he was a stalker
finally coming out the woodwork.