[rdfweb-dev] PPD

[Julian Bond]

jo walsh <jo at abduction.org> wrote:
>
>> The basic problem IMO is that we have two types of FOAF users. Those who
>> want to do RDF and those who want to do social software and wish to use
>> FOAF as a format for personal information.
>>
>> Social software folk should forget about RDF and FOAF and do their own
>> thing. RDF will only hold you back and drag you down.
>
>from here, you're either crazy, or have it in for social software
>developers. i see it stated often that each time another friendster,
>tribe, myspace, orkut etc takes off, the case for this data being user
>owned and publically accessible machine-readable becomes stronger and more
>obvious.
>
>these 'social software' services don't seem useful or deeply interesting
>in and of themselves;

Woah, woah, woah, woah (in the words of the song). Nice to see that the 
philosophy of the excluded middle is alive and well. ;-)

YASN sites are a rich source of metadata. They should let some of that 
metadata out into the wild because it's cheap advertising. It's the same 
argument as for producing RSS (which incidentally far too few SNs do). 
FOAF + a bunch of other RDF vocabs is as good as anything to do this. We 
just need to make sure that the YASNs play nicely and their metadata is 
actually valid, useful and reasonably easy to parse.

There's a second issue for YASNs and many other types of site that 
maintain user account records. Automatically importing and syncing a 
user account with/from some other source is non-trivial. And foaf on 
it's own is nowhere near complete enough to be used as a data 
interchange format for user account data. For this to work it's going to 
need some standard and I'm still open as to whether it should be XML, 
RDF or somewhere in between. There's a lot to be said for using RDF, 
FOAF and a new vocab that fills in the gaps.

I happen to think this is a worthwhile effort but I'm not getting any 
traction with the idea. But then I haven't written the v0.1 example code 
either.


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