[foaf-dev] FOAF-based whitelisting project

[Kjetil Kjernsmo]

On Sunday 11 March 2007 01:58, Dan Brickley wrote:
> > You might want to take a look at mod_virgule, the software used to
> > implement www.advogato.org and robots.net, and a few other
> > community sites. It includes a trust metric system and trusted
> > members of the community now have FOAF files as part of their
> > profile.

Oh, I wasn't aware of it, but that's very nice indeed!

> > If nothing else, I'd be happy to modify mod_virgule to submit
> > trusted user's FOAF data to whatever sort of repository your
> > anti-spam system will use. Or is it more of a distributed system
> > where you'll just direct spamassassin to the source of the FOAF
> > file?

My idea is that we use a single trust metric for everything, I would 
suggest an integer in the interval [-100,100], -100 indicating strong 
distrust, 100 indicating full trust. That metric could be returned from 
either a web service or a locally hooked up system, but I think that it 
could be relatively computational intensive, so that data would need to 
be centrally compiled and maintained. 

I think we need to think ahead in terms of sufficient performance. Since 
there are allready like 17 million FOAF profiles, and we know that 
every received email will result in a lookup, we know as a benchmark, 
we need to have decent response times given those constraints. It 
should not be bandwidth intensive (I'm thinking a REST URL, responding 
with a single text/plain containing the metric), but computationally, 
it may require some heavy lifting. 

If successful, imagine if we get myspace on board, we could easily get 
50 million users in the network, and imagine if 50 million people 
getting 500 spams a day uses it... Or perhaps not think about that 
right now... :-)

> Kjetil, did you see
> http://www.w3.org/2001/12/rubyrdf/util/foafwhite/intro.html ?

Yup! We discussed that a couple of years ago, at which time I promised 
that I'll do it... :-) I guess I have lowered my ambition somewhat, 
since my primary contribution is to create the plugins and stimulate 
the community to commit to the trust metric. 

My current idea is simply to gather all the FOAF we trust, including 
vCards and whatever, do a little reasoning to produce a weighted graph 
which can be quickly queried. The main thing with foafwhite.rb is to 
offload this logic to each user, which is an interesting idea, but what 
I had in mind was to centralise it. 


Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer
kjetil at kjernsmo.net
Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/     OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC