[rdfweb-dev] Scenarios for the FOAF standard

[Bill Kearney]

> 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...

It's like RSS in that it's expected to be a way that hides the gnarly bits of
interop.  I'd hardly think it's something that's syndicated.

> 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.

Not a bad assessment.  This is where I find great value in utilizing what the
RDF-oriented folks have to offer.  They're /thinking/ about these sorts of
things AND they're motivated to share that thinking with others.

-Bill Kearney