FOAF

I just discovered a series of interesting blog entries from Danny Weitzner, W3C Technology and Society Policy Director and co-director of MIT CSAIL. These aren't especially new links, but I thought they might be worth relaying ...

Reciprocal Privacy for the Social Web - provides an introduction for a proposal "to establish a reasonable privacy balance in social networking environment" using FOAF. Also of interest is a link from Shahan Khatchadourian describing the use of FOAF and OpenID to establish trust/prevent spam. Apparently the solution could be available from Ryan Lee as a Drupal module? In some ways, this sounds similar to the Social Network Portability concept mentioned by Stephen Downes.

I've been working with FOAF recently, which is an RDF schema (format) for representing personal information and connections between people and appear to have found a wrinkle in the standard.

foaf:mbox is correctly described in an implementation independent manner, allowing for email message boxes, jabber message boxes and even voicemail message boxes. Unfortunately, foaf:mbox_sha1sum, which is the protected form of foaf:mbox to hide it from unwanted messages, is specified in such a way that only email is permitted:

A foaf:mbox_sha1sum of a foaf:Person is a textual representation of the result of applying the SHA1 mathematical functional to a 'mailto:' identifier (URI) for an Internet mailbox that they stand in a foaf:mbox relationship to.

I suggest that this be changed to:

A foaf:mbox_sha1sum of a foaf:Person is a textual representation of the result of applying the SHA1 mathematical functional to a URI that they stand in a foaf:mbox relationship to. Note that the URI must be complete, including any 'mailto:' or similar prefix.

foaf:mbox could also be clarified by changing:

A friend of mine, Paul Trafford, has observed that the Mathematics Genealogy Project appears to be slowing to a crawl, in more ways than one.

The centrally organised database project collates a research genealogy for mathematics, recording who studied under whom for their Ph.D. Unfortunately there appears to be currently a single grad student maintaining the database and updating takes a week.

This sounds like an ideal use for RDF/FOAF to me. Individuals host and update their own data (which naturally they are the authorities on), with links to the libraries holding copies of the thesis as evidence that the thing exists. They also link (naturally) to their supervisors and colleagues data, and so a crawler can build up a web. People can then build their own interfaces and more importantly, data can be updated in real time.

But, maybe I just have RDF on the brain.

In Creating e-Portfolios using Atom and FOAF, Scott Wilson writes:

"An e-Portfolio is, by definition, an aggregate or composite of many facets. We can look at this quite literally as an e-portfolio being aggregated from multiple feeds, each of which supplies items about a particular aspect of the subject."

and goes on to say "I'm interested in finding out WHY something more complex [than FOAF and Atom] would be necessary."

Stephen Downes in E-learing 2.0 suggests something similar:

"... Rather than being composed, organized and packaged, e-learning content is syndicated, much like a blog post or podcast. It is aggregated by students, using their own personal RSS reader or some similar application. From there, it is remixed and repurposed with the student's own individual application in mind, the finished product being fed forward to become fodder for some other student's reading and use.

"More formally, instead of using enterprise learning-management systems, educational institutions [might] expect to use an interlocking set of open-source applications...."