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?