Chris Schmidt ([info]crschmidt) wrote in [info]ljfoaf,
@ 2004-02-24 12:35:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Orkut message - LJ FOAF
Since I've seen a lot of demand for FOAF from orkut, I thought I'd post a message to my friends on the site, a lot of whom are semantic webbers. This is the post I made to my Friends of Friends network on orkut - a message that got sent out to 750+ people.

If you are part of any large social site, you may want to do the same thing. Pass the message along - increasing the size of the semantic web is a goal not just for geeks, but for everyone.

----------- START -------------
to: friends of friends
subject: LiveJournal FOAF
message: I know this won't be applicable to all of you, but a fair number of people will probably be interested in this.

LiveJournal now exports FOAF data, including foaf:interests, foaf:knows, and contact information. It's exported for every user at http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/foaf . Discussion of the LiveJournal FOAF files can take place in a community I maintain - http://www.livejournal.com/community/ljfoaf . If you're interested in FOAF, that's the place to come to discuss it.

For those of you who don't know what FOAF is, it's the "Friend of a Friend" project - http://www.foaf-project.org . This project is geared towards making your relationships with other people machine readable.

FOAF is a way to describe yourself, and your relationships with other people. Orkut is a prime example of a site that could export FOAF data - your contact information, which you choose to display, could be displayed in an exportable format.

Some people might ask "What's the point?" The point of FOAF is to allow machines to look through people, find information that you might be interested in about that person, and deliver it to you.

Perhaps I'm interested in other people that are friends of my friends who live near O'Hare airport - I'm looking for a ride. So, I put in my FOAF file, which defines my friends, and tell it to search for "basedNear" codes of O'Hare airport. By using FOAF, it could expand out, find friends of friends, and give you back contact information for them.

The tools to do this thing need larger base data to advance. We need to be able to describe ourselves in a way that computers can understand in order to make better our interactions. This is the purpose of the semantic web - and LiveJournal is working to start it off.

Orkut can help too. Tell orkut today that you want FOAF data exported. Let them know you want to see machines talking to each other. In the end, you may be helping to start something big.

-Christopher Schmidt
lj:crschmidt

(Post a new comment)


[info]revgeorge
2004-02-24 10:43 am UTC (link)
FWIW SongBuddy, which uses friendships similar to LJ, exports FOAF at http://www.songbuddy.com/lc/users/foaf/username and I should have the FOAF import code done tonight. I think that FOAF is going to be the only way to manage all these social sites.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]crschmidt
2004-02-24 10:57 am UTC (link)
I'm already thinking of what applications I have that I can add FOAF type data too. For example, I have a web app that allows people to find others who share classes with them. With FOAF type data, this is trivial:

Foaf:person->chris
   attendsUniversity UIUC
      hasClass Math285, Altgeld Hall, Alexy Stepanov
      hasClass CS232, DCL 1320, Craig Zilles


Then simply use FOAF:knows to spider out friendships looking for people who share the same school, the same classes, etc.

Suddenly, you've turned a unique data model that I used in my specific case into a nationwide thing. People can easily fine other people who share classes.

However, until we see a killer app that does this well, we're stuck. We need this killer app before this stuff will go big. We need big sites to export the data they already have, so it can all be integrated into one place. We need all kinds of things, and none of them are even that difficult - they just require cooperation.

And cooperating to share data is what the Semantic Web is all about.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]revgeorge
2004-02-24 11:23 am UTC (link)
I think it was Scott McNealy who said "The value of a network is the square of its nodes." FOAF certainly is more valuable today thanks to your efforts to add 2 million more data sets, and I think 2004 will be the year for FOAF. I don't understand why people in a crowded environment like social networking sites wouldn't make it easy for people to bring their friends in quickly and easily with FOAF.

I think that the killer apps might come in different forms too though. I like to think SongBuddy will become a killer app when someone creates an FOAF-reading plugin to get recommendations, but there's also spam filtering, webs of trust, and more. I think that they will come from sites like LiveJournal exporting their friendship data for other people to analyze, rather than people hand-generating them.

I still can't understand why sites wouldn't support FOAF. It's like Prodigy or AOL back in the day before they supported SMTP. They thought they could just ignore the rest of the world, and once they started paying attention they actually started doing well.

Thanks again for all your hard work on this.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

Create an Account
Forgot your login?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…