...is to engineer more coincidences in the world. There are several reasons for FOAF, and this is one that hasn't yet been documented. After my mostly unexpected involvement in the W3C Semantic Web Tour as it hit London, I was chatting to Matt Biddulph about FOAF and the 'vapourware for the masses' thing, and it occured to me that I'd never written this up. FOAF was designed as technology to encourage coincidence. You're walking past a pub... you go to a conference... you're standing at the barracades... or sitting in an interview... and the last thing you'd expect... a friend of a friend. Everything's connected. Who'd have thought it?
To pull this off, we need to ground FOAF in the real word. Foaffinger (a wireless / rendevous FOAF detector), RDF GeoInfo, Bluetooth and more are all part of the picture. Every new gadget, every new dataset, makes the unexpected more expected.
Posted by danbri at June 22, 2003 12:41 AMHey I've been wondering the same issues. How 'bout starting off with somebody getting FOAF.org and start there.
Posted by: Marc Canter on June 26, 2003 08:42 AMrdfweb.org _is_ the 'foaf.org' you keep mentioning, with xmlns.com for the XML vocabularies that support FOAF (ie. FOAF, WOT, Wordnet).
ie. welcome aboard! If you're interested in the future of FOAF, do please join the mailing list (rdfweb-dev@vapours.rdfweb.org) and join the discussions...
Posted by: Dan Brickley on June 26, 2003 09:41 AMThe Bluetooth and FoaF combination sounds very interesting, would you suggest I put the Bluetooth id of my phone in my FoaF? I'd guess it would be best as a hash.