[rdfweb-dev] your homepage url? / cpan data merge demo

[Dan Brickley]

(copying foaf list)


Hi Norm,

(Slightly related to http://norman.walsh.name/2003/06/06/karma)

http://nwalsh.com/foaf.rdf suggests:
	Homepage: http://nwalsh.com/

But http://nwalsh.com/people/ndw/index.html (or http://nwalsh.com/people/ndw/) seem 
also to have good claim on being your homepage(s)...

Is 'http://nwalsh.com/people/ndw/' the most appropriate URI to use? Reason I ask is 
that I've been fiddling with a demo which merges CPAN info in RDF with other FOAF, in 
support of queries such as 'find me RSS feeds for weblogs of CPAN contributors'...
If I get a chance, I'll chunk in the W3C TR page data too, so we can find weblog 
posts from Web-folk who are CPAN contributors too. This is an experiment to try to 
show utility from simple data merging tools, and maybe at same time shed some light on
'uris for people' design options.

Anyway, there are currently two ingredients. A convertor for CPAN info (very basic) and
a set of sample FOAF records I've hand coded to give us something to be getting on with. I
stumbled across your entry in CPAN so you're one of the folks I've listed, hope that's OK.

See http://rdfweb.org/2003/06/cpan/ for scrappy work in progress.

This sorta ties into the 'identifiers for people' thing, in that the two RDF files 
get merged together based on unique properties, which include mbox, mbox_sha1sum, and 
homepage. Neither file is, alone, adequate to answer questions like 'find me weblogs of 
Perl contributors'... My merging script is primed to know about a few 
owl:InverseFunctionalProperty names, but is basically domain-neutral. After the merging, 
a basic rdf query rewritten into SQL can match appropriately:

http://rdfweb.org/2003/06/cpan/lookups.rb gives...

danbri at fireball:~/cvs/cvs.danbri.org/rdfweb.org/htdocs/2003/06/cpan$ ./lookups.rb

	Earle Martin (http://downlode.org/ weblog: http://downlode.org/blog.pl)
	Jo Walsh (http://www.zooleika.org.uk weblog: http://www.zooleika.org.uk/blog.html)
	Norm Walsh (http://nwalsh.com/ weblog: http://norman.walsh.name/)

...hence the question about your homepage URI(s), as my cpan dump and sample RDF was 
being merged with other data (incl. your foaf file) which disagreed with it. Not that 
there is anything wrong with having two homepages, except it makes my query results look
untidy.

Next thing to do is mine CPAN (via CPANPLUS::Backend) for info on collaborations, 
perhaps by assuming folk collaborate if they are authors of a common package. Would make a 
nice dataset to feed to FOAFNaut/SVG tools, perhaps...

Dan