[rdfweb-dev] XSLTs for FOAF, Spring v1.3.1 and plans for FOAFspecimprovements

[Jim Ley]

"Julian Bond" <julian_bond at voidstar.com>
> I think RSS 2.0 can teach us something here. It should be possible to
> use namespaces to allow extendability and to allow intermixed RDF while
> still maintaining a consistent structure of FOAF elements that are
> parsable by plain XML parsers.

I really don't see the value in having some constrained format of FOAF
without extensions, FOAF is really really dull, I can see that coming from a
networking background you may feel different but to me, peoples names and
who they know is just dull - it only becomes interesting when you mix it
with other information.  So I don't see what a simple profile would give us,
other than make it slightly easier for people who can't be bothered picking
up an RDF toolkit to draw pointless visualisations of peoples networks.

I recently gave a talk on just such a visualisation network, and the
response from the audience (other than COOL!) was about getting new
information in there restaurant/movie/book review information - friends
often have similar viewpoints on such stuff so being able to see that data
is good.  Or documents/programs/presentations friends have given is
interesting, allowing us to discover new things - a basic XML language
simply won't cut it in this space, unless you propose constraining all of
RDF down to some silly simple to parse XML.

> This could just as easily have been coded
> <foaf:Person rdf:ID="1">
>   <foaf:knows>
>     <foaf:Person rdf:ID="2">
>     <foo:relationship>Acquaintance</foo:relationship>

Not in an RDF model...  So it would instantly break for all the real RDF
parsers out there.


To me your basic viewpoint is one coming from a very constrained view on
FOAF based on your use cases, please look to other peoples use cases.

Jim.