[rdfweb-dev] foaf update

[Dan Brickley]

OK I'm off to France (W3C/Europe) for the week, from tommorrow. 
Here's a quick catchup of FOAF stuff as the weekend runs out of steam...

 - vocabulary status annotations
   FOAF vocabulary now contains assertions which use the 
   http://www.w3.org/2003/06/sw-vocab-status/ns terminology 
   previously discussed. Almost everything is flagged as 'testing', 
   with a fair few 'unstable' properties, notably the bulk of the 
   naming vocabulary.

 - vocabulary changes
   new classes, 'foaf:Agent' and 'foaf:Group'; the former because 
   various properties feel over-constrained with a domain of 'Person',
   the latter because several of us are experimenting with variants of 
   it, and there is a clear need to do something. Both are flagged as 
   'unstable'. Agent is a super-class of Person, Organisation, Group.
   foaf:Group will need some attention to get right. 
   http://rdfweb.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8 is the bugtracker entry 
   for this.

  new property, 'foaf:based_near'. A stopgap to scratch an itch that 
  has been bothering several of us, until something along the lines of a 
  vocab like http://esw.w3.org/topic/GeoOnion comes along. The 
  foaf:based_near property relates geo:SpatialThing instances to 
  geo:Point locations, ie. elaborates on the minimalistic geo / wgs_84
  vocabulary we provide at W3C, http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/
  Also flagged as 'unstable', largely to reflect the vagueness of 
  the notion of 'near'. The new property is documented in the wiki 
  at http://rdfweb.org/topic/UsingBasedNear as well (already!) as  
  in  http://www.kanzaki.com/docs/sw/foaf.html#foaf-geo
  (which now also covers nearestAirport markup).

 - weblog burblings
  A couple of technical documentation posts this week, on 
  'foaf contradictions' and 'identifying things in foaf'. Also a few 
  news-roundup posts, re Japanese docs, Semaview's paper + foaf browser,
  digiboy's foaf creation tool + auto-discovery evangelism, 
  foafbot/dashboard, and Dan Hon's 'Handshake' UI screenshots. 

- website re-organisation
 OK, some new news. It is becoming clear that FOAF will for some time 
 have a stronger identity than the broader semweb hacker stuff which 
 rdfweb.org as a developer site provides. I'm happy with the way 
 the rdfweb.org site is shaping up as a bunch of tools to support folk 
 who are fairly interested / involved in all this stuff, and who are 
 not scared by words such as 'xml'. But there is a need for more 
 user-facing materials, and (I've come to think) for a website with 
 the letters 'foaf' in it's domain name.

 So... over the weekend I've made a start on migrating the FOAF 'home 
 page' to a separate FOAF site, which I'll at some point redirect the 
  http://rdfweb.org/foaf/ URL to. The new site is a single page job for 
  now, http://www.foaf-project.org/ and which currently consists of little more than a one sentence summary, a very big version of Ian Davis's cute 
 FOAF logo, and some quick links to... useful stuff. I don't expect this
 to be a big site, most things can happily stay at rdfweb.org but a 
 few FOAF-centric pages there could make things easier for people new to 
 all this.
 
 The main thing I think to do initially is create a page or few which 
 explains those funny little FOAF icons to the non-geek interested 
 party, ie. to answer the 'wtf is this FOAF thing?!' question in a way 
 that assumes less technical obsessiveness than we have to date.

 Work in progress, but probably worth switching over to in the next 
 week or so, given that the current FOAF homepage is pretty crap too.
 I thought I'd share where I'm up to, rather than go 'ta da' with a 
 finished product... Feel free to write 
 <a href="http://www.foaf-project.org/">FOAF</a> instead of citing 
 http://rdfweb.org/foaf/ already, I'll clear up remaining navigation 
 confusion when I'm back from France.


 - foafcorp logo hacking
  Playing around with the foaf logo thing in Gimp, an idea for a foafcorp
  design: http://www.foaf-project.org/images/foaflets.corp.png
  ...in general I think this is a fun graphic (thanks Ian!) as it can
  be goofed around with in various ways while keeping the same basic 
  look. Might be worth thinking about how the colours compare to 
  those used in foafnaut and other foaf stuff.... (Liz?)

 - coding
  I've started re-running my FOAF harvester. It doesn't find as much 
  data as it should, I think due to bugs in the Ruby Rdf parser, but I've 
  just launched a mailing list for that effort so hopefully it'll be more
  robust soon.

 
That's about it. Oh, one more thing, I have a beta testers account on 
TypePad, see my test site at http://foaf.typepad.com/ and have to say 
I'm really impressed with what they've been up to, not just the FOAF 
stuff (which is very exciting) but the whole usability thing. 

kutgw,

--danbri