[foaf-dev] for more information please log in

[Story Henry]

On 13 Jan 2008, at 20:57, Dan Brickley wrote:

> +cc timbl
>
> Story Henry wrote:
>> If a foaf file is to return different representations depending on  
>> the authentication level of the person looking at it, there needs  
>> to be some way for the foaf file to say that. Something like: for a  
>> larger view you may want to log in there: http://...
>> Any thoughts on this?
>
> Is this FOAF specific? Or just a general thing with authenticated  
> views of Web sites.

No, as you correctly guessed, this is not foaf specific. I just posted  
it here because I had been thinking of this in terms of the topical  
problem of social network "portability". The idea of portability is a  
lot less interesting to me than the thought of social network  
connectivity, or linked social networks. But to do this one will have  
to answer the problem of how to make some relations visible to some  
people and not to others. I know that a lot of people are happy to put  
their business information available online for all to see, but would  
rather not have everyone read their family relations. So if Facebook  
or LinkedIn are going to be able to publish foaf files we need make it  
possible for them to offer this functionality.

The simple way to solve that problem is to return different  
representations to different people viewing a particular foaf file.  
But of course for the server to know who these people are it would  
have to ask them to identify themselves somehow. Usually on web sites  
this is done using a "log in button". So that is why I was wondering  
what the best way to do this would be in RDF. Perhaps just a

<> opeinid:login <http://bblfish.net/login> .

relation? Once logged in my whole domain  (bblfish.net) would be able  
to treat requests for rdf coming from that client in a more  
personalised way.

As you correctly point out this is a more general problem than foaf.  
But we have a use case here. Who should we ask for help? I mean which  
forums would be helpful to go to for further information?

> http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/ is my Flickr photostream (and  
> hopefully soon an :openid for me too). When I'm authenticated it  
> offers me more information than you'll see (and more action  
> possibilities). Some of that extra info might be linked versus  
> embedded, some might be in HTML (or RDFa or microformat).

yes

> Relatedly I was discussing with TimBL a bit lately the issue of how  
> different the representations of a document can get, before you  
> really ought to be using different URIs. This came out of practical  
> questions around Tabulator behaviour, since Tabulator rigs your  
> browser to say "hey, gimme the RDF version", meaning you miss out on  
> seeing HTML documents that are content-negotiated with RDF variants.  
> Tim argued that the HTML and RDF ought to be available from  
> different URIs. Perhaps there's some common 'best practice' here re  
> authenticated views of pages too. Or as you suggest, just need for a  
> bit of vocab to describe the various deployment idioms that are  
> already out there.

agree.

> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
> --
> [ :openid <http://danbri.org/>; :weblog <http://danbri.org/words/> ]

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 2429 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.usefulinc.com/pipermail/foaf-dev/attachments/20080113/9c23ab85/smime.bin