Post on 19-Jan-2015
description
the
From philosophy to features:
BBC semweb workshop, Sept 5th 2008Dan Brickley <http://danbri.org/>
friendof
afriend project
what we made and why we made it. what it helps you make, and what happens next...
The Web.-worldwide
-decentralised
-unpredictable-pluralistic
FOAF.-homepages as data
-linked information
-out of control-standards-based
“An experimental linked information system”
1989
“To a computer, the Web is a flat, boring world, devoid of meaning. This is a pity, as in fact documents on the Web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them.”
“For example, a document might describe a person. The title document to a house describes a house and also the ownership relation with a person.”
“Adding semantics to the Web involves two things: allowing documents which have information in machine-readable forms, and allowing links to be created with relationship values. [this will] help us exploit the information to a greater extent than our own reading.”
Tim Berners-Lee "W3 future directions" keynote
1st World Wide Web Conference Geneva, May 1994
1994
!
!
2008
The World:
The Web:
Pages make claims.
FOAF is a dictionary. (‘a’, not ‘the’...)
...of choice
...of expression
...of association
...of movement
“Freedom...”
Philosophy?
[...]
Freedom of choice?
Spoiled for choice!
Freedom of expression?
As you write what you like on a homepage......you can express what you like in FOAF.
(without a group of English-speaking
programmers deciding if it’s “useful”)
Independent extension encouraged
Freedom of movement?
(Sometimes walls are there for a reason...)
Freedom of association?
(technical & social barriers)
“Humanity is a tangle, which the Web lets us see...” (TimBL ‘08)
Features?
Search...Yandex.ru, Aug 15th 2008:
“The FOAF (friend of a friend) standard makes blog search or social network search deeper and more accurate, in particular, it allows searching friend feeds and user profiles”
“the largest blog services in the Russian internet including Livejournal.com, Liveinternet.ru and Blogs.Mail.ru, represent user profiles in FOAF.”
Is Google the next Google?
“The Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the web more easily available.”
“...indexes the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup
and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add
to the social infrastructure of the web.”
Friendfeed.comExports your account list using FOAF...
Are we playing with fire?
What happens when the data walls
come down?
What if we get our data back?
‘Out of control by design.’
pownce.comTribe.net
SGAPI. SIOC. DOAP. Laconica. Google Dbpedia. SearchMonkey. Yandex.
FOAF isn’t a feature.
...also aren’t features.
What BBC-ish features might FOAF help with?
OK, but ... features?
Karma sharing
Social media re-aggregation
Buddylist import
‘Find my friends...’
Profile discovery & import
Favourite band? news topics?
Content targeting
Annotation filtering
Search disambiguation
& more...
The End.
Questions?