[rdfweb-dev] FOAF User Stories

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sat, Apr 09, 2005 at 11:11:15PM +0700, Hendy Irawan wrote:
> Hi RDFWeb-ers...
> 
> So I have read a bit about FOAF, the spec, and its related schemas...
> 
> Are there FOAF user stories available? Something like the description
> of real and imaginary [potential] uses of FOAF, which are seemingly
> more exciting than reading the FOAF specs themselves.
> 
> Thanks all...

I got an email from a name I didn't recognize the other day, inviting me
to participate in a movie going event, claiming he got my email from a
friend who was interested in the same kind of movies I was. I updated my
local RDF model with the latest results of my three level scutter run,
and found out that he did indeed know me as a friend of a friend.
Jumping over to FilmTrust[1], I checked the movies he had rated, and
passed his and my usernames to my rating comparator, seeing how we had
agreed on common movies we had rated.

He and I had ratings in movies which matched almost completely: 80% of
our ratings matched within a half star out of four, so I decided it
sounded like an event I was interested in. I went back to my local
store, grabbed his contact information, and found out according to his
MeNow[2] status, he was playing Cube[3], with a server name given. I had
a bit of free time, so I decided to hop into the game for a bit. If
nothing else, we'd have stories to share.

After a rousing game of Cube, he logged out, and I followed suit,
hopping onto AIM to let him know I'd gotten his email, and that I'd
pulled the location information for the event from his calendar RDF data
and merged it with mine, so I'd get a reminder from my cell phone when
it was about to happen, and dumped an image I pulled from his FOAF file
to my phone so I'd know who I was looking for.

I went to the movie evening, and saw some new films I'd never seen
before, which I promptly rated in FilmTrust. He and I have been good
friends ever since, and the only reason that I bothered was that I could
find out enough about the person and the event from RDF to encourage me
to go.

------

This isn't a true story, but is a true possibility with existing
technology. I personally keep all of my contact information in RDF, for
easy queries, and I run an IRC bot for queries against a 2 megatriple
RDF store. I've written RDF scutters, and I was the 47th member of
FilmTrust. Although this may a bit out there, for the RDF geeks among
us, I don't think it's at all out of the question.

Is this the kind of thing you mean?

[1] http://trust.mindswap.org/FilmTrust/
[2] http://crschmidt.net/semweb/menow/
[3] http://www.cubeengine.com/

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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