[rdfweb-dev] foaf thoughts

[Jim Ley]

"Flo Ledermann" <ledermann at ims.tuwien.ac.at>

> however, some questions still remain open, and some new emerged, and
> after i read through the whole archive of rdfweb-dev yesterday,

That's dedication!

> concerning the things itself, i think this is not a
> problem and even intended like this by rdf and namespaces, but the
> abstract concepts like "trust", "resource", "lending" etc. should maybe
> go into the foaf core.

or a sharing vocab, creating new vocabs should be encouraged I think.

> i would want to have
> two basic relationship types, "knows" and "trusts", without any further
> specification or quantification (of course that can always be layered on
> top of that). i think with these two relationships we could go a long
> way, because i would have some way for rapidly extending my personal
> network with people i know, without giving away too much control and
> still connecting to my friends (the people i trust) in a tighter way.

The problem is that we trust people differing amounts on differing subjects,
I might trust Chris Lilley on SVG stuff, but not trust him on a movie
recommendation, or trust him to not throw me off a bridge given the
opportunity.

> is there any rdf query language that can perform these
> kind of tasks?

Yeah pretty much most of the query languages could do the queries I think.

> whereas towards a strangr i might be more careful with
> giving out information or i might even lie to him/her! how do we model
> that in rdf/foaf? i know this has been discussed on the list, but for me
> no conceptual solution was ever presented. i don't like the
> cryptographic approaches that have been discussed, because they might
> ensure integrity of the information, but i am more interested in this on
> a conceptual level - how do we want this to work? i think the
> cryptographic approaches are just not fine-grained enough to solve this.

They're the only approach that will work though, if we're going to publish
the data, the only way we can limit it's exposure is outside the RDF model,
since once a DB has got the triples, you're unlikely to get the triples
back.

> the major implication of such a feature would be that it requires more
> infrastructure to set it up - at least a webserver that you can control
> and script to a certain amount - and would therefore go away a bit from
> the grassroots p2p approach that is possible now. on the other hand - it
> is just an optional enhancement, and people could still publish thier
> public info through static rdf files, as they do now.

I think the signing method gives you what you want, foafbot comes along to
you and says I'm foafbot working for the #foaf community, please give me
some info, and you just serve it the content you're willing to give that
community, the security mechanism is there, and if you don't have any server
negotiation ability, you can just seeAlso all your RDF files, most of which
couldn't be decrypted.

Cheers,

Jim.