[rdfweb-dev] Serious question about silly attributes

[Peter Saint-Andre]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2003 at 12:07:49PM -0400, Dan Brickley wrote:

> Aside: FOAF itself has not been marketed to date, on purpose,
> because it has many characteristics that suggest a risk of a scary 
> network effect adoption curve, and we're not ready for that. 

Well, as mentioned, we in the Jabber community (or at least me as
"patron saint of Jabber" ;) are looking seriously at adopting FOAF to
define profiles for users as well as other entities on the Jabber
network. And the Jabber network has tens of thousands of servers as well
as an estimated 7 - 10 million end users. So we might introduce a bit of
a network effect. :)

> Lately I've been working on the core FOAF spec. When that's in a more
> respectable form, it will be time to document more clearly how someone 
> would go about creating their own RDF extensions to work with FOAF.
> Already there are a few of these (see links at end of 
> http://rdfweb.org/topic/FoafVocab) but the process could be much better
> documented (eg. we have a lot to learn from the RSS 1.0 Extension
> Modules experience here). I think the priority has to be to get the main
> FOAF spec out first, shortly followed by some HOWTO for extending it in 
> separate namespaces.

+1. As manager of the Jabber community's standards process, I might
recommend something along the lines of what we use, which is modelled
after both the Python process and the IETF process:

http://www.jabber.org/jeps/

This works well for us, and it provides a way for us to standardize core
parts of the protocol (some of which even get sent in through the full
IETF process) while also publishing informational extensions.

> To recap this into a roadmap:
> 
> 
> (i) FOAF spec rewrite (in progress)
> (ii) Improve documentation for 'how to make your own vocab'
> (iii) Explore vocab for generic OnlineAccount
> (v) fix in light of implementation feedback, court cases etc...

This looks great. I'm excited to see the rewrite, since it will help me
make the case for FOAF in the Jabber community. I'm happy to help with
editing and such if need be, too.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.php