Info Feed Weblog
Dec 17, 2002
FOAF: Friend of a Friend
Just stumbled across FOAF, which is a format for displaying and connecting personal metadata. It works like this: I publish my FOAF profile, you publish yours, and thus we could conceivably connect with each other -- given there was an application for that.At dooyoo, we had something called Web of Trust (see Epinions' description for a lack of a dooyoo one) to connect people and reviews with each other. The idea here is similar to Amazon's recommendations via collaborative filtering: "if you like this, you will probably like this as well", or in terms of the Web of Trust "if person A likes product X AND you like person A, then you will probably like product X". Using FOAF, I could see a very nice decentralized application of that principle, bringing my dream of the perfect infomediary closer to reality.
Let's take books as an example. All participants publish simple RSS files of books they have read. They include a rating for each book. All participants have a link to their book review RSS file in their FOAF profile. An application gathers and aggregates all this data. It will then spit out books I might like. Similar to All Consuming perhaps, but even more decentralized if you will. I would love that. Obviously, there are numerous problems involved (how do you get people to create all this information?, what's the business model for the aggregator to provide this service?, how do they all unify on one data format?, ...), but I've got ideas on most of this, just not ready to put them down in writing. :-)
So much for the description, now onto some unstructured ramblings for my own benefit (I intend to get back on this in a few weeks):
- FOAF project homepage
- Introductory article: Finding friends with XML and RDF
- Keeping personal metadata decentralized is very scalable, and if I only have one metadata file to keep up-to-date, I will certainly do. If I could connect it into my other web profiles, that would be terrific. No messing with wrong and out-of-date data
- I can put the IDs of friends of mine directly into my FOAF profile. Taking data from many people together, you can make interesting interconnections. The co-depiction example is perfect to show what can be done (scroll down this page to see what it is).
- It allows for interesting approaches to fighting email spam by whitelisting, but it also has serious dangers in equipping spammers with a nicely crawlable network of related email addresses.
- More links: Sample FOAF file, FOAF-o-matic, FOAF Web Viewer, Tomas Jogin on FOAF
Posted by Stefan Smalla on Dec 17, 2002 at 17:56 | Permalink