[rdfweb-dev] Nicks needed to support anonymity

[Dan Brickley]

[snip]

Yes, I agree about the utility of foaf:nick, although given the current 
design, which doesn't scope the 'nick' to any particular service or
dataset, it is a bit rough'n'ready. The evidence from various Japanese 
FOAF files, where foaf:nick is used in preference to giving full name,
is also important.

The other naming properties (as has been pointed out) are a mess and 
need rationalising. Doing names 'properly' is a huge task, and it isn't
yet clear how much can be achieved easily.

>From my perspective, things like 'foaf:nick', 'foaf:geekCode',
'foaf:plan' etc give FOAF much of its character. It should be possible
for their presence to co-exist with more professionally oriented 
terms such as 'foaf:workplaceHomepage', 'foaf:workInfoHomepage',
'foaf:publications' etc. The mixing of professional and informal gives
FOAF its character, and probably the Internet as well. If we remember
that RDF vocabularies are intended to fit together like chunks of a 
shared dictionary, then having a few 'interesting' terms in the
dictionary is as natural as having rude words in the 'real' dictionary. 
Just because they're in the dictionary, you don't have to use them!
(this fits naturally with the 'missing isn't broken' design of RDF; 
RDF schemas tell you what've you said, not what to say [1]).

I'm reminded of a breathless Wired mag piece from Oct 1994, ah here it's
online now: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mosaic_pr.html
whose sidebar piece I'll always remember for gushing 
"Last night Mosaic blew my mind". I'll inline it here:

	Why I Dig Mosaic
	Last night Mosaic blew my mind. It was not the underlying technical
	elegance of the browser, for Mosaic functions lurchingly, with many
	gasps and wheezes. Images traveling through the Net don't appear
	quickly, even when they flow through a 56-KByte line. But Mosaic blew my
	mind nonetheless. With seamless grace, it brought me in contact with
	information that I didn't know I wanted to know.

	I launched Mosaic for a prosaic reason: to track down some details about
	the World Wide Web on the pages at CERN in Geneva. But I typed the
	address incorrectly - or had copied it down wrong - and I soon found
	myself wandering aimlessly along the interwoven strands of the Web,
	listlessly clicking on links, circling in the near vicinity of CERN (not
	geographically, of course, but along vectors of association), hoping in
	a rather lame way to hit on the document I was looking for. Finally, I
	found myself standing on the NCSA demo page, much as tourists wandering
	through the complex alleys of an old city will, when their energy runs
	out, eventually walk along with the flow of traffic and find themselves
	in one of the main intersections or town squares.

	Many documents are linked into the NCSA demo page, which is full of
	links leading out into the Web. I scanned down the lines of gray text
	and selected a blue link that had nothing to do with my official
	mission: "An experiment in hypermedia publishing: excerpts and audio
	from a book reading by author Paul Kafka of his novel LOVE Enter," it
	said. This, I hoped, would be a nice breather.
 
	Upon entering the page, I was immediately distracted by another link, a
	quiet alcove halfway down that read "poetry archive". I wanted to see
	the poetry archive. I clicked. "Unable to connect to remote host,"
	Mosaic responded. I was peeved. The door was locked! I clicked a link at
	the bottom of the screen, where the name of the author of the page was
	listed: Paul Mende. After a minute of waiting (not unusual), Mende's
	picture appeared. He was smiling and young, with bushy brown hair and a
	large mustache. His page listed his research interests: "String Theory,
	Quantum Chromdynamics." Then came a section called Odds and Ends, under
	which were listed New Fiction and Readings, Benjamin's Home Page, and
	"local docs." What were the local docs? Who was Benjamin?
	
	Before finding out, I glanced at the rest of the document, and it was
	then that I began to experience the vertigo of Net travel. On the lower
	parts of the page were abstracts of Paul's scientific papers, some
	co-authored with Benjamin Grinstein. "High energy string collisions in a
	compact space," was one of the titles. This meant nothing to me, of
	course. But, having sought a respite in poetry, it was dizzying to have
	wandered into the company of a physicist.

	It was a type of voyeurism, yes, but it was less like peeking into a
	person's window and more like dropping in on a small seminar with a
	cloak of invisibility.

	One thing it was not like: it was not like being in a library. The whole
	experience gave an intense illusion, not of information, but of
	personality. I had been treating the ether as a kind of data repository,
	and I suddenly found myself in the confines of a scientist's study,
	complete with family pictures.

	When I clicked on the link titled Benjamin's Home Page, I found that it
	did not belong to Benjamin Grinstein, Paul's scientific co-author, but
	rather to Benjamin Mende, his son, a beaming, gap-toothed 3-year-old,
	who announced at the top of the page that his research interests were,
	"Sand. Also music, boats, playing outside."


The Mendes have this article archived online, it turns out, see [2].
This was Wired's first big story on the Web and Mosaic. My hope for FOAF
is that it continues this tradition of 'the illusion of personality',
allowing for the description of people in a way that treats them as
rounded, quirky, individuals rather than mere authors, collaborators, business
opportunities. The Semantic Web needs a human face, because ultimately
all of this is being done for and by people. The Web endeared itself to
many of us just because it allowed so many kinds of information to be
freely mixed; CVs and bibliographies, hobbies, photos, silly obsessions.
FOAF just tries to carry some of those characteristics of the homepage
across into the world of the Semantic Web. 

BTW many of the concerns that motivated FOAF (eg. various dehumanising trends
that accompanied the commercialisation of the Internet) also find
expression in the (stylistically somewhat more American) writings to be 
found on the 'Cluetrain Manifesto' site (see [3]).  The key point being
that we shouldn't, through restricting the terminology in FOAF or
demoting the informal/fun terms, force people into presenting themselves
as stereotypical consumer-units. This is not to claim that the
existence of foaf:geekCode is a triumph of free speech, just that such
properties serve a purpose beyond the frivolous, as they show how a
bland FOAF description can be decorated with extras that carry more 
meaning than is found in your average addressbook-in-XML data format.

cheers,

Dan

[1] http://rdfweb.org/mt/foaflog/archives/000047.html
[2] http://www.het.brown.edu/people/mende/wired/
[3] http://www.cluetrain.com/