[foaf-protocols] [foaf-dev] revisiting FOAF project goals

[Dan Brickley]

On 24/6/09 13:33, Matthew Rowe wrote:
> Hello
>
> I concur with what Dave has said here, particularly regarding the need
> to explicitly define topics of relationships and associated trust values.
>
> I think that the latter issue (assigning trust values to relationships)
> as this appears to becoming especially important now that work within
> the Semantic Web community is moving towards trust.

Quick thought here - though I've written about it a little before - is 
that a flexible Groups mechanism takes off some of the pressure to 
explicitly define direct interpersonal relationship types. Instead we 
let users enumerate various kinds of group that make sense to them. So 
rather than create inSameBookClubAs relations between Alice and Bob, we 
allow Alice and/or Bob and or the Book Club to write a description of 
the people in that group. Having a first class object (the group) 
provides also an extensibility hook for additional properties. As often 
noted, this is hard with simple flat RDF triples...

Dan