[foaf-protocols] Person <-> Group (+sub/related groups) relations...

[elf Pavlik]

Hello,

I work more and more with sites for online communities, recently I look how to take advantage of FOAF for representing structure of membership in groups and subgroups plus relation between groups/sub.

Looking at it from perspective of seeing various profiles, in a group profile it seams easy to include list of participants with foaf:member property of a group. But other scenarios I see getting more complicated:

On profile page of a person I would like to include list of groups this person participates in. In the mailing list archives I came across two mails talking on this topic (guessing could find more digging deeper...)

http://markmail.org/message/5pz7wxhgdbgtzei7?q=foaf+group+person&page=2#query:foaf%20group%20person+page:2+mid:jmdmi7ql3ptcmggk+state:results
where Dan Brickley proposes solution like:
<foaf:Person rdf:about="#me">
  <foaf:name>John Doe</foaf:name>
</foaf:Person>
<foaf:Group rdf:about="#group1">
  <member rdf:resource="#me">
</foaf:Person> (typo:  s/Person/Group)

plus RDFa XHTML exmaples

IMHO stating membership in lets say 100 groups may look quite awkward using this pattern, but machine shouldn't care much ;)

in second mail: http://markmail.org/message/jjm5x4y4tbdc5eom?q=foaf+group+person&page=3#query:foaf%20group%20person+page:3+mid:jjm5x4y4tbdc5eom+state:results
Henry Story suggests:

"Why not just use foaf:member ? In N3 and rdfa writing the inverse relation is
easy. In N3 it is

person is foaf:member of group .

in rdf you use the rev= attribute. Better use these syntactic tricks that keep
inventing inverse relations for everything."

I couldn't find wiki page clarifying this issue, if it doesn't exist I would like to help with creating one...


Going further how could I state relations between groups? Very often in group profile it has related groups and subgroups as for example this one (sidebar): https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/7826/lorea/

Once more I would like to later on help with updating wiki with clarifications I hope for posting this question.

Thanks a bunch!
=)
~ elf Pavlik ~

https://wwelves.org/perpetual-tripper
https://hackers4peace.net