[rdfweb-dev] Re: XML.com 'Semantic Web: A Primer' article (the SW and you ;-)

[Libby Miller]

hi,

I wonder whether maybe crypt functions of mail addresses might do (see
perl script below - excuse my perl ;-). Here I've used the
straightforward perl crypt function, which has the advantage that people
could encrypt their own files on unix but databases would still be
consistent - but maybe it's too easy to guess, especially if you had a
lot of other information about where people worked, their name etc. 

Anyway, this type of method would keep the structure that we have
already - i.e. identifying people as the person with a certain
mailbox. This is what I'm going to do in my own mini project for
gathering as much data as I can about the people on the IMesh mailing
list http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/imesh/, where e-mail addresses are
available only to members of the list. I want to create an RDF database
of projects, people and organisations involved in the subject gateway
community, and this seems like a way of linking them together without
people being spammed. You could still do queries getting all the
information about a person fairly easily.

Libby


#!/bin/perl 
# script to find all the e-mails and hash them for webwho type stuff

$ARGV=shift @ARGV; my $filename=$ARGV;

open (FILEN, $filename);

while(<FILEN>){

$_ =~ s/(\"|\>)(\s)(\S\@\S)(\s)(\s*)/$1$3$5/g;

$_ =~ s/(\"|\>)(\S*\@\S*)(\s*)(\<|\")/mysub($1,$2,$3,$4)/ge; print "$_";


}

sub mysub{

my $email=$2; 
my $salt = substr $email, 0, 2; 
return $1.crypt($email,$salt).$3.$4;

} 





On Mon, 6 Nov 2000, Aaron Swartz wrote:

> Dan Brickley <daniel.brickley at b...> wrote:
> 
> > This stuff also raises countless interesting legal/technical/political
> > issues surrounding unique identification of inviduals... Not to
> > mention privacy...
> 
> Which is true. It always bothered me that RDFweb used mailto:s to identify
> people. I think this is a bad idea, for several reasons:
> 
> 1) people are afraid to give out their email because of spam
> 2) email addresses change and become outdated
> 3) email addresses let you contact the person, but don't give any
> information by themselves
> 
> I'd propose website URLs, with these benefits:
> 
> 1) plenty of people have websites
> 2) they already have lots of information on them
> 3) if they change, people can set up a PURL
> 4) if you don't have one, you can still set up a PURL, pointing to
> nowhere
> 
> -- 
> [ Aaron Swartz | me at a... | http://www.aaronsw.com ]
> 
> 
> 
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> 
>