[rdfweb-dev] Proposal: Names in FoaF

[Jim Ley]

[a long time ago] "Morten Frederiksen" <mof-rdf at mfd-consult.dk>
> >> That is indeed an interesting point, one that foafnaut solves by
> >> checking for signatures on the documents.
> >Yeah, this is why asked this question months ago.  I still haven't seen a
> >satisfactory answer.
> I'm sure Jim would be happy to tell us how he does it, I'm quite
> interested as well.

Foafnaut doesn't solve the problem yet, foafnaut itself still trusts
everything equally, however the database has been supplemented with the
provenance info, and it does check the signatures of documents, which is the
first step towards building the trust mechanism.

The only place it's currently exposed in a public interface is in the whois
script:

e.g.
http://jibbering.com/foaf/whois.1?nick=mattb
http://jibbering.com/foaf/whois.1?nick=danbri

This would easily allow us to prefer certain names/locations etc. over
others, however it doesn't help us with the smushing problem - someone can
lie and provide multiple email addresses for the same person, and confuse 2
people, and this isn't so easily detectable, unless we only allow people to
self certify their addresses, and not trust anyone else on peoples
addresses.  I don't think that's helpful, especially given the number of
people who sign their files.

Jim.