[foaf-dev] RDF triple assertions live forever?

[Julian Bond]

Publish something on a web page, allow it to be spidered, and even if 
your domain goes off line forever, that page will still exist in places 
around the web. Provide an RSS feed and the words will get stored 
somewhere. Post to Usenet or a mailing list run by the majors and your 
post will stick around. With pretty much anything on the intarwebs it's 
almost impossible to delete it completely.

As it is with html, RSS and nntp, so it is with rdf. Except that the 
granularity is smaller. An individual triple can start in one place, be 
smushed repeatedly and end up in places you really weren't expecting. 
Once you let them out of the box, triples take on a life of their own.

So. Once upon a time it seemed like a good idea to have wildcard DNS on 
a domain with some FOAF. The FOAF got spidered on multiple domains, 
laptop.domain.com, w.domain.com, www.domain.com, foo.domain.com. The 
apparent assertions multiplied and were republished. No matter that most 
of that returns 404 now, the assertions won't go away.

Take the recent Tribes.net debacle. They produce no FOAF now. Any 
triples that came from Tribes.net are now obsolete. How long do you 
think it will be before references to them disappear?

-- 
Julian Bond  E&MSN: julian_bond at voidstar.com  M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173
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                     Where's My Food In Pill Form?