[rdfweb-dev] foaf thoughts

[Flo Ledermann]

Jim Ley wrote:

> "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.

ok good point. i don't really know the intended scope of foaf - is there 
some kind of definition or some usecases of the things that should be 
doable with foaf vs. the things that clearly lie outside the scope?

>> 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.

ok, then we need a better /structural/ approach for specifiying trust, 
but i don't like the idea of rating or categorizing these kind of 
things. still, i would want to distinguish between knowing somebody and 
trusting somebody (i even might trust people more who i know less than 
others, quite obviously). in your example, i might know several people 
that have a background in SVG, but i trust only this one friend of mine 
concerning this subject.

maybe we can use reification for things like that, like

:Flo :believes [:Chris :trustedIn :SVG] .

ore we could interpret

:Flo :knows [:name :Chris; :trustedIn :SVG] .

as "Flo knows a person called Chris, and he trusts him concerning the 
topic SVG". (i'm not sure if this is correct n3 syntax, but you should 
get the idea)

i am just asking myself how this survives in the graph and is not 
reduced to ":Chris :trustedIn :SVG ." , without preserving the 
subjective context.

>>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.

hmm.. well i didn't know if there are any. a quick google turned up 
squish, triple, rql, versa and the like. which ones are worth looking 
into, with a foaf/php/python/javascript background?

>>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.

hmm.. well maybe the problem can really be solved on the UI side 
alone... i have to think about it a bit more. One problem i see is 
certainly the management of all the keys for all the entities you are 
communicating with. if you really want to share some information 3 hops 
wide, and everyone has five friends, you already need to exchange keys 
with 125 entities, before you can communicate. or am i getting something 
wrong here?


thanks for the answers!

f/0


-- 
|-
| Florian Ledermann <ledermann at ims.tuwien.ac.at>
| http://www.ims.tuwien.ac.at/~flo/
|-
| TU Wien - Vienna University of Technology
| Interactive Media Systems Group
| Favoritenstrasse 9-11/188/2
| A-1040 Vienna, Austria
|-
| "I think I'm thinking, therefore I possibly are."
|-