[rdfweb-dev] Scenarios for the FOAF standard

[Julian Bond]

I was mulling over this morning's crop of emails and came up with this. 
There's a mismatch here that has spilled over into technical discussions 
about RDF, XML parsers and such like. I'd like to present two views of 
FOAF. They're not mutually exclusive and there are others.

1. FOAF is RSS for people.
I'm not the first and I won't be the last person to come to FOAF and go 
"Wow, this is RSS for people. That's totally awesome. I want to play."
This approach says that FOAF is potentially an easily writable, easily 
parseable standard format for coding up information about people and the 
relationships between them. And since people and their relationships 
have huge applicability, this could end up being very widely 
implemented. Bigger than RSS. And that will enable people to build all 
sorts of apps that we haven't thought of yet. Like the potential to let 
us build de-centralized versions of the social networking sites that are 
"This Year's Big Thing" or at least to link them together. And to link 
all the blogs together. And to...

2. FOAF is yet another namespace.
A number of people working in the RDF metadata area found there was a 
need for a bunch of RDF classes and properties to describe people and 
the relationships between them. There didn't seem to be anything useable 
in existing namespaces and there weren't any that could be obviously 
extended in this direction. So they created one. FOAF will get used by 
people who find RDF useful and need a namespace like it for the data 
they're working on. As RDF grows and becomes more widespread, so will 
FOAF. And because people and their relationships appear in a lot of 
problem domains, the FOAF namespace will probably get used a lot in RDF 
data.

-- 
Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond at voidstar.com
Webmaster:              http://www.ecademy.com/
Personal WebLog:       http://www.voidstar.com/
M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173   T: +44 (0)192 0412 433