[foaf-dev] (no subject)

[Anthony Steele]

Hi, foaf dev list. I'll float my comments here and see what the reaction is.

For a pet project of mine, I am interested in serving data about people and their relationships to other people, and using the existing FOAF vocabulary seems like a good way to go about it rather than inventing yet another incompatible XML schema.

I have some comments on the fields and possibly shortcomings of the FOAF vocabulary from my point of view:

Biography:
Most social networking or community sites include an explicit or de-facto area for a person to describe themselves in human-readable text. It's often called "bio" or "about me". It's as common as .plan files (which you support) were. Is there a way to do this in FOAF, or can it be added?

Friends groups:
The way that I would like to do this would be a many-to-many relationship. 
I.e. many groups are defined by name, many friends are defined, and the friend falls into zero or more of those groups. That data can be held in the back-end, but I would prefer to expose some of it as well. 


Partial disclosure: I am particularly interested in methods of identifying who is requesting the information, and disclosing none/some or all of it depending on who is asking. 
E.g. a person may disclose their age in years (or conversely, just day and month of birth) to everyone, but keep their precise date of birth only for authenticated friends.

I realise that this is not part of the FOAF XML spec, it is a step to go through before the FOAF XML is served; but is there a standard or preferred way of verifying who is requesting the data? Is openID the way to do this? It must be tied into the FOAF XML since the listed friends  are the ones who can have privileged access.

Once there is authentication and privileged access, people may wish to show details such as email addresses (handled by mbox property), home, work or mobile phone numbers, postal or residential address (not handled). If a non-human agent (e.g. a company or university) is described, this kind of data is usually made public. 

Showing contact data to friends is not theoretical; I've seen this kind of thing done on some social networking sites.

Thanks
Anthony


-----------------------------------------
Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email
Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam