[rdfweb-dev] Which Person wrote this FOAF?

[Emmanuil Batsis (Manos)]

This probably supports the addition of a foaf:file or something in the 
place of seeAlso. It could be used in statements about statements (i.e. 
to say this info came from Foo's foaf file). Other ways of documenting 
where information came from when merging foaf files could be better as a 
solution, but in general I agree in the importance of knowing where a 
particular statement occured. Could be used in constructing weighted 
graphs based on trust metrics etc.


Julian Bond wrote:
> I was going round and round last night trying to understand this.
> 
> Most FOAF files in the wild follow a pattern. They have one foaf:Person 
> with lots of information about the person that wrote the file and then a 
> long list of foaf:Persons with minimal info linked via foaf:knows. 
> There's an implied suggestion that the Primary foaf:Person information 
> is authoritative because it's about the person that made the file.
> 
> Several of the Foaf Explorers (even those written by RDF-heads) display 
> this implied information because the main person is displayed first at 
> the top of the html page.
> 
> When you look at the file as triples, this implied authority is lost. 
> It's just a list of foaf:Persons one or more of which have a list of 
> foaf:knows. There's no explicit triple to say that this foaf:Person 
> wrote the file authoritatively and it's mostly about them.
> 
> As well, in triples, there's no reason why a file shouldn't have more 
> than one "primary" person.
> 
> Now I'm not trying to go down the route of pgp signing and proof of 
> ownership. I'm just trying to recover the information that this file is 
> mostly about this person. In the XML view it's mostly obvious because 
> the file only has one top level node and that's a Person. But how am I 
> supposed to extract this information from the triples?
> 
> We could use foaf:maker and foaf:made to store the data but these are 
> new and not widely used yet.
> 
> For a spider, it probably doesn't matter because this file just adds to 
> the data store of triples and they're all related via an mbox_sha1sum 
> key. But for a FOAF explorer that html-izes a single file, I think it does.
> 
> Is this just an artifact of RDF-API for PHP (RAP) and other RDF parsers 
> have a getTopNodes() function or something to extract the lower level 
> XML structure info if required?
> 

-- 
Manos Batsis

     _  __    __                    __
    / |/ /__ / /____ __ _ ___ _____/ /_
   /    / -_) __(_-</  ' Y _ `/ __/ __/
  /_/|_/\__/\__/___/_/_/_|_,_/_/  \__/

http://www.netsmart.gr
mbatsis at netsmart dot gr
(+30) 210 33 02 608
(+30) 210 33 02 658
http://forte.netsmart.gr/foaf/manos_foaf.rdf