RDFWeb and Friend of a Friend (FOAF)

FOAF 'vs' Introvertster

Things are heating up in the battle for the hearts, minds and contact lists of introverted Web geeks. While an Introvertster craze sweeps through workplaces and homes, FOAF's under-used foaf:myersBriggs support seems to be slowly catching on, revealing a disturbing trend. According to members of the Myers Briggs personality classification cult, individuals branded as IN** (ie INTJ, INFJ,INTP,INFP) should number no more than about 4 or 5% of the population. Yet a recent sampling by RDFWeb's FOAF scutter shows an alarming outburst of introversion amongst FOAF early adopters...

(I'm mostly serious...;-)

While I generally find MBTI a bit contentious, including foaf:myersBriggs has been an interesting exercise and even from the rather small dataset we have currently, there appear to be a distinct leaning towards the IN** side of things.

Dusting off my sociologists hat, there are various hypotheses we could investigate. Maybe FOAF's current audience is mainly geeky early adopters, people who show up as IN** when they go through the annoying-but-probing online questionnaires which try to approximate a full (tm)-compatible MBTI analysis. Maybe the character summaries for INTP are more flattering and ego-stroking than for other 'types' (or at least, more flattering to the kinds of people who show up as INTP in the surveys). Or at least, more likely to evoke a 'heheh, yeah that is sorta like me' reaction. Maybe INTP's like FOAF as a non-extraverted way of describing what they're like, and perhaps this extends to attaching a 'beware I'm an INTP / introverted freak, don't expect me to talk to you' health warning to their machine-readable homepage. Maybe INTP-ish people are the only ones obsessive and nit-picky enough to deal with RDF and XML syntax, while other types have malformed FOAF files which don't get past the RDF parser? Maybe the survey sample is too statistically insignificant to tell us anything.

Enough armchair sociologising about how 4% turned into 50%+, where's the data?

The results mentioned above come from an incomplete (but 24hrs+) run of my FOAF harvester ('scutter') from a couple days ago, ie. are based on a bunch of source-attributed RDF statements stored in a PostgreSQL database. I'll give the code example first, then the results, summarising all the foaf:myersBriggs properties that the database knows about. It uses my rough-n-ready RubyRdf library, and might some day be nicely packaged for others to use. In the meantime, here's the rough idea...

The mbti.rb script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
#
# Quick script to query RDF store for Myers Briggs data
$LOAD_PATH.unshift '../lib/'
$LOAD_PATH.unshift '../../lib/'

require 'basicrdf'
require 'squish'
require 'dbi'

query = SquishQuery.new.parseFromText <<EOQ;
    SELECT ?x, ?n, ?mb,
    WHERE
        (foaf::name ?x ?n)
        (foaf::myersBriggs ?x ?mb)
    USING
      foaf for http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
EOQ

seen=Hash.new(false)
stats=Hash.new(0)
log=''
DBI.connect('DBI:Pg:scutter1','danbri','') do |connection|
  connection.select_all(query.toSQLQuery) do |row|
    if !seen[row['x']]
      log += "foaf:name='#{row['n']}' foaf:myersBriggs='#{row['mb']}'\n"
      seen[row['x']]=true
      stats[row['mb']]=stats[row['mb']]+1
    end
  end
end
puts "Statistics:"
stats.each_key do |type| puts "mbti type: #{type} count:#{stats[type]}\n" end
puts "Details:\n"+log

And here's the results of running it just now:

./mbti.rb
Stats:
mbti type: .... count:1
mbti type: ENFP count:1
mbti type: INTP count:11
mbti type: ENTJ count:1
mbti type: ISFJ count:1
mbti type: INFP count:2
mbti type: INTJ count:3
mbti type: ISTP count:1
mbti type: ISFP/ISFJ count:1
mbti type: ENTP count:1
mbti type: ISFP count:1
Details:
foaf:name='Michael Hanscom' foaf:myersBriggs='ISFP'
foaf:name='Bill Bradford' foaf:myersBriggs='ISFJ'
foaf:name='Jay Fienberg' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Hiroki Ono' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Eric Wahlforss' foaf:myersBriggs='ENTP'
foaf:name='Margaret Hart' foaf:myersBriggs='....'
foaf:name='Adam Gessaman' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Simon' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Jack Letourneau' foaf:myersBriggs='INTJ'
foaf:name='Earle Martin' foaf:myersBriggs='INFP'
foaf:name='Atsushi Suzuki' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Evan Williams' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Amy van der Hiel' foaf:myersBriggs='INTJ'
foaf:name='Dave Seidel' foaf:myersBriggs='ISFP/ISFJ'
foaf:name='\343\201\221\343\202\223\343\201\237\343\202\215' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Nicole Sullivan' foaf:myersBriggs='INFP'
foaf:name='Bounty Hunters Guild' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Chun-shek Chan' foaf:myersBriggs='ENFP'
foaf:name='Amy Alford' foaf:myersBriggs='INTJ'
foaf:name='Mark Pilgrim' foaf:myersBriggs='ISTP'
foaf:name='Jim Ley' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Manuel Gonz\303\241lez Mart\303\255nez' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Justin Knol' foaf:myersBriggs='INTP'
foaf:name='Masahide Kanzaki' foaf:myersBriggs='ENTJ'

Not much more to add really, thought this might be a fun mini-tutorial on RDF query. But I would be interested in pointers to other statistical analysis of MBTI data. In particular I reckon it would be worthwhile to feed the raw answers to the online quizes to statisticians, to see if the 16 types proposed by MBTI-advocates actually reflect clusterings within the data...

Posted by danbri at August 4, 2003 02:58 PM | TrackBack