[foaf-dev] Re: updated FOAF spec

[Dan Brickley]

Phil Archer wrote:
> I must apologise for complete silence on this discussion so far and 
> thank everyone for including me in it.
> 
> Obviously, like Shadi, I am most grateful, Dan, for your doing this 
> work. Also, the discussion about managing vocabularies, stability etc is 
> critical.

Yup, and extends beyond FOAF too. There are lots of other folks' vocabs 
that I want to use now, but have some evidence that they'll be usable in 
10-20 years time. Pushing them all thru formal standards is infeasible, 
yet ignoring the issue is unwise too. So I'm very interested to try to 
find some middle path between formality and chaos here.

> Our next POWDER meeting is on Monday and we'll discuss this then. It is 
> possible, but by no means certain, that later in the year we'll want to 
> come back with further terms we think are useful. For example, sooner or 
> later we'll want to work out just what we'd expect to find in a 
> foaf:Organization instance. The vCard stuff is obviously important here 
> as well but might be the SKOS topics and, quite possibly from FOAF, 
> things like fundedBy and theme. Actually we're already planning to use 
> skos:relatedConcept to anchor user-generated tags in something with 
> better-defined semantics.

Oh, interesting. I was thinking fundedBy was very un-loved. The spec has 
a big health-warning on it now, ... but yes I do see the relevance to 
content labelling. http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_fundedBy ... so that 
might be some reason to stablise and keep that term.

Basically, keep us posted on what you need, and I think you'll find us 
accomodating...

BTW I've just had a chat with Tom Baker re FOAF and DCMI (Ivan, I owe 
you a reply to your mail too, later today I hope). Am going through 
comparing FOAF to 
http://dublincore.org/groups/agents/agentFRdraft2-2.html which is quite 
an interesting exercise. One issue that crops up is that FOAF doesn't do 
life-cycle dates itself, beyond date of birth ... instead ... there's a 
separate vocab ... http://vocab.org/bio/0.1/ which had some traction 
there. This is classic semweb I guess ... everything depends on 
everything, for better or for worse...

cheers,

Dan


> Phil.