EDUCAUSE | FOAF

Privacy related links of interest ...

mpasiewicz — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:57:06 -0600

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.

FOAF and jabber/XMPP

StuartYeates — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 07:37:23 -0500

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:

The foaf:mbox property is a relationship between the owner of a mailbox and a mailbox. These are typically identified using the mailto: URI scheme (see RFC 2368).

The foaf:mbox property is a relationship between the owner of a mailbox and a mailbox. These are typically identified using the mailto: URI scheme (see RFC 2368) or any other scheme which defines a protocol suitable for storing messages for an owner.

In an ideal world, of course, the jabber/XMPP community would get their act into gear and finish standardising already so we could make direct reference to the xmpp: URI scheme

The Mathematics Genealogy Project slows to a crawl?

StuartYeates — Thu, 18 May 2006 09:35:46 -0500

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.

ePortfolio with FOAF and Atom -- proof of concept

nils_peterson — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 11:31:00 -0600

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...."

We decided to take up Scott's challenge. It seemed that the FOAF and Atom specifications could represent the person and their artifacts, but we wanted a example instance, an implementation, to critique.

Using Macromedia Flex, a development environment for Flash applications, Jack Waknitz created a portfolio for me. We started wiith my ELGG FOAF profile and some feeds from my Flickr site. Jack added "Document" references to the FOAF that point to the Flickr, while I pushed around organized images into feeds using Flickr tags. The whole enterprise took under 2 work days.

Jack's application in Flash opens and renders the FOAF file, and then opens the referenced Flickr feeds and renders them under separate tabs. Other applications might be developed to do this same work (Flex was handy for us), including, we conjecture, an XSL Transform. We are fairly certain that the processing of the chained files is too much for CSS.

My portfolio is here (the system now gets the FOAF file from the URL (thanks Jack) [It seems a little buggy loading the images in Mac Firefox and Safari.]

The FOAF it reads is here: http://flex.ctlt.wsu.edu/flex/Portfolio/foaf.xml
The Atom comes from my Flickr tags "timberframe" and "raisingprocess."

***Postscript

On further thought, we explored adding a reference to an XSL transform to the FOAF file above. Now, when you browse it, your browser sees reference to the XSL and you see an HTML formatted page, rather than the raw XML. (View source to see the file contents).

SO, might one do away with Flex in the story above; imbed XSL transforms in the FOAF and the Atom and just let the browser do the work? One issue is that you could not just use Atom from 3rd parties, you'd need a process like Feedburner to manipulate the Atom (much as they make podcasts by finding <a href pointers to .mp3 files

end postscript***

Conclusions

Scott's conjecture that FOAF and Atom are sufficient for making an ePortfolio seems well founded.
If authorization for viewing the portfolio is required, it could be added by placing the Flex application on a secure web page.
If authorization for the feeds is required, that will require additional analysis.
Some Atom sources, e.g., Flickr, add some extraneous branding text to the feed, which might not be desired in the portfolio, feed sources should, as a rule, let the end user have maximum control over the feed content.
Portfolio creators might want multiple FOAF files, for different purposes; a FOAF editor application that goes beyond FOAF-a-matic would be handy.
Our application assumes the FOAF points to RSS documents. This assumption would need to be generalized, the user might want to include documents of several types, including single files (.doc, .PDF)
Because a user might want to re-mix content that is individually available in several feeds, as RSS editor application might be desirable as another auxiliary tool. A blog or del.icio.us might serve as a remix tool/RSS editor.