[rdfweb-dev] Names In FOAF

[Dan Brickley]

Well, we got grief for things changing too fast, and being too
volatile, so things slowed down for a bit. But you're right, there's 
need for a kick up the backside. One reason for inactivity on the spec
front was just that the software which generates the script died. A
couple of FOAF IRC meets ago I tried to take myself out of that 
bottleneck by soliciting volunteers to fix it. And Chris Schmidt kindly
took on the task. A couple of days ago, I plugged in his rewrite of my
script and regenerated the spec:

	http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
	Namespace Document 3 April 2005 - (Back In Business Edition)
	$Date: 2005/04/04 16:08:07 $

Regarding use of energies elsewhere, that is in fact one reason for slow 
progress here: people have been working on other RDF vocabularies that play 
alongside FOAF. Some of that is happening within W3C; for example, you 
might take a look at the work we're doing in the SW Best Practices WG,
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/

In particular, there is work on topic description (both SKOS, and also
mappings between RDF and the XML Topic Maps approach). SKOS in
particular is very important for FOAF, as it allows us to cleanly 
describe and merge thesaurus-like, and folksonomy-like information.
There are some specs nearly published; editor's drafts at 
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/#FreqLinks1
-> http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core/guide/

Re the naming stuff, I've wondered before whether a W3C group would 
be a more appropriate forum for it, particularly given the I18N
challenges. W3C groups have the advantage of meeting in a high-bandwidth
forum (telecons + occasional f2f). But this can be a disadvantage for
those who can't readily participate this way. Re names, I like the
direction Ian suggests.

Anyway, thanks for your interest in the project.

Dan