July 28, 2003
Pages about people
A few people have asked how we can use FOAF to express that a page is about a person, or whether there is a way within FOAF to write testimonials about other people (presumably along the lines of various popular dating sites).
The former is easy; the latter isn't something the FOAF vocabulary currently supports. Not because it would have been hard to add, but because it would have opened a can of worms that is best left to ripen a little while longer.
But FOAF does have a way of describing the topics of pages, which is a way of providing similar functionality.
So, let's imagine you've written a whole HTML page all about one of your bestest friends, and you want to share that fact with your world by adding something to your FOAF file. How to do that?
The basic idea is one that recurs throughout FOAF. We use the foaf:topic property, which is a relationship between a Document and something that the document is about. In your FOAF file, you can mention that you know someone, and at same time mention that there's a page you made that's about them. Here's some example markup:
<!-- imagine you're Alice and this is the markup in your FOAF about you -->
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:nick>Alice</foaf:nick>
<foaf:knows rdf:nodeID="bob"/> <!-- a pointer to the 'bob' entry below -->
<foaf:made rdf:resource=""/> <!-- this says: I made this FOAF file -->
<foaf:made rdf:resource="http://alice.example.com/why-bob-is-great.html"/>
</foaf:Person>
<!-- some markup describing a document, and its topic -->
<foaf:Document rdf:about="http://alice.example.com/why-bob-is-great.html">
<dc:title>A page all about Bob, by Alice</dc:title>
<foaf:topic>
<!-- here is a chunk of data about bob -->
<foaf:Person rdf:nodeID="bob">
<foaf:nick>Bob</foaf:nick>
<!-- other stuff about bob could go here -->
</foaf:Person>
</foaf:topic>
</foaf:Document>
What this basically says is "There is a Person whose nick is 'Alice' and who made this current FOAF document and who knows a Person whose nick is 'Bob'; there also is a Document whose title is 'A page all about Bob, by Alice' that Alice made and that is about Bob."
So one question facing us in the FOAF design is finding a trade-off between simplicity and expressiveness. It is possible to use FOAF to say some fairly complex things, but we have our work cut out to improve the tools and tutorials that explain how to create FOAF files that say what we want them to say.
Here's a diagram of the above example markup, generated by the W3C RDF validator. It may be useful for illustrating the underlying pattern of relationships we're trying to describe in the FOAF markup...
Posted by danbri at July 28, 2003 11:59 PM
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What I'm really looking for is a concise way to tag a name as a person in the midst of another document (presumably XHTML). People conventionally use a link to a home page, or perhaps a google search, but wouldn't it be better to use a logical tag, and then let tools do with it what they need?
I'm reacting right now to Stefano Mazzocchi's "Semanticsheets" post (http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/26/). His examples look weird to me because ultimately they are still using "a href" to tag his identity.
He suggests <a href="http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/" class="identify">Stefano</a>
But i have a hunch that better would be:
<foaf:Person>Stefano</foaf:Person>, except that I'm not sure what attribute you'd add to the tag to tie it to him.
I have some sense that I should be able to sneak in his mbox, or ths mbox_sha1sum, but then I start thinking that I need to next some other tags, and suddenly it's too much hassle.
If it were as easy to tag people, places, and things in web pages with unique IDs in some controlled vocabulary as it is to link them to a google search on that name, the amount of useful metadata on the web would quickly explode.
(I guess the urn:isbn syntax was going to try to do this for one well-known controlled vocab about books, but that doesn't seem to be going anywhere -- so maybe it's another chicken-and-egg problem.)
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