[rdfweb-dev] Tidy up your FOAF week

[Julian Bond]

Last time I tried to get a "Tidy up your FOAF week" going I got some 
traction but it was stopped because the Relationship namespace was in 
flux.

So let's try again.

What are the FOAF and RDF "mistakes" that really wind you up in the FOAF 
that's out there in the wild? And best practice you wish people would 
use. Here's a start:-

- If it's a PersonalProfileDocument put in the PPD tags. And only have a 
single top level person. Remove all those dummy test entries. Try not to 
have circular foaf:knows. eg if the document is about Alice and says 
Alice knows Bob, don't put Bob knows Alice in B's detail. That belongs 
in Bob's PPD.

- Include at least one of mbox_sha1sum, weblog or seeAlso in all 
foaf:knows objects. If there's no index or a pointer to where there 
might be one, then saying you know them is pointless as the data can 
never be smushed.

- Use DC eg dc:title instead of rdfs:label

- Don't create a new namespace if there's a perfectly good one already 
out there. For instance use geo: for lat/long, iCal for calendar, vCard 
for Address.
SeeAlso http://www.schemaweb.info/

- Strip out mbox entries for other people. You can do what you like for 
yourself but you should only publish mbox_sha1sum if it's not your 
mailbox.

- Don't use rdfs:seeAlso as an element of foaf:Person to point at things 
that are not FOAF. If it's a sub-element of something like foaf:weblog 
that's OK.

- Include <admin:generatorAgent> and <admin:errorReportsTo> so that it's 
relatively easy to find a human contact to complain, sorry, report 
errors to.

-- 
Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond at voidstar.com
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