RDFWeb and Friend of a Friend (FOAF)

FOAF Myers Briggs addition

So after discussions sprawling across IRC, email and various weblogs, we are going ahead with adding a property called foaf:myersBriggs to the FOAF vocabulary. This property takes as its values the 16 codes (INTP, ENFP etc.) used in the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality description scheme.

Example FOAF snippet:

<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Dan Brickley</foaf:name>
<foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:danbri@rdfweb.org"/ >
<foaf:myersBriggs>INTP</foaf:myersBriggs>
</foaf:Person>

Adding such markup will make it possible to browse, search and filter FOAF-related data using the MBTI classifications. For example, you might use it to search for weblogs created by people with some specified Myers Briggs entry (perhaps to check out to see if they fit the expected stereotype...? ;-).

There are a bunch of MBTI-related web sites out there; the Open Directory listing gives some reasonable starting points. The HumanMetrics site has an online version, which is probably what you're after if you just want a four letter code to paste into your FOAF description. For those taking this more seriously, the Personality Page has commentary and characterisation of the various distinctions emphasised in the MBTI.

For what it's worth I don't take MBTI too seriously as a piece of science, but it's interesting to see how people fit (or don't fit) into their scheme, and (like all of FOAF) it is entirely optional. Only publish a foaf:myersBriggs classification if you're happy making such information public. Same goes for your foaf:geekCode or foaf:schoolHomepage.

More detailed exploration of RDF/XML vocabulary for this sort of thing will probably happen in other vocabularies than FOAF, for example in Bill Kearney's draft MBTI namespace. There are of course dozens of other similar schemes and online questionnaires that we could hook up to FOAF, but this should make for an interesting toe in the water.

Unless anyone finds some huge flaw or better idea in the next week, we'll add this to the FOAF vocabulary documentation later this month.

Posted by danbri at December 17, 2002 12:20 AM