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

[Matthew Rowe]

> 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

I like this idea of using foaf:Group, like you say it does include the  
flexibility of allowing the definition of individual groups.

How about also including additional specialised types of foaf:knows? I  
like the the types used by XFN [1] to describe relationship links with  
other people. Not sure how this would in structurally, maybe:
<foaf:colleague>
	<foaf:Person about="#Alice">
		<foaf:name>Alice</<foaf:name>
	</foaf:Person>
</foaf:colleague>



[1] - http://gmpg.org/xfn/

Matthew Rowe, MEng
PhD Student
OAK Group
Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
m.rowe at dcs.shef.ac.uk