[rdfweb-dev] FOAF browsing and FOAFster

[Jim Ley]

"Marc Canter" <marc at broadbandmechanics.com>
> A best practices page (on the Wiki) could resolve many of these
> ambiguities.  I'd gladly help flesh that out..... recanting many of the
> lessons I'm learning here (and elsewhere.)

I don't think so, since then we'd be imposing our notion of what a homepage
has to be - it's any of those things, so people are free to say that such
and such a page is their homepage, and been can put links anywhere - it
doesn't matter where this stuff is put or linked to, it just matters that we
can find it for the purpose we need, if it's getting metadata about the
creator of the page, then it needs to have that info from every page, if
it's for aggregrating, then it needs to be discoverable, the foaf vocabulary
(and by extension the foaf files) don't have a single purpose of finding
friends, they're just about people, so wherever we talk about people, we
need to have some foaf vocab, constraining where it goes doesn't help those
goals.

> If you're into modeling reality - to build a semantical web - how can we
> have relationships that are only one-way?  Certainly SOMEBODY must want
> a reciprocated, confirmed relationship?

Of course, that's easy to get, if two people both say they know the other,
you have it, in foafnaut - it's identified with a solid rather than broken
line.  Whilst you could freely say that you foaf:know me, and I foaf:know
you (the RDF for this is simple) - it's not a good idea, since you would be
the person describing who I knew and that's my right.  We can merge files
together, it's easy, our aggregrators will do it (and in PIMs I'd've thought
they'll be doing this on the end user machine with pings from the big
aggregrators when new info about people is available, and where to get that
ingo.)


> I don't think it's a matter of real-time updating, as much as
> convenience of having to manually update/change my stored foaf.rdf file.

Well that's just an authoring tool, people are working on those, that to me
is simply a non-complex issue just needing someone to have the time and the
UI skills to develop it, there's certainly no major modelling issues to
prevent it from happening.

> Is there some mechanism/service I'm missing - that will take what I've
> got - so far - and add/merge in new names, updated meta-data, new info -
> into my existing foaf.rdf?

Foaf Explorer has the ability to update the foaf with people you know,, what
more do you want, beyond the authoring above?

> What value would this add to me, why do I want to exist on some portal?
>
> Marc clarifies.......
>
> Well what value would Haystack give you? Why is Nat Friedman doing
dashboard?

Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by portal, having foafdata at my
fingertips (and I have over 2000 peoples data available to me with simple
searching) has proved extremely useful, and annoys me when people don't have
the information I want, but it's with me, in app I control, I don't see the
value in having it off in some portal, that's what I'm querying - what does
the portal give?

Jim.