Re: Should dbpedia have stuff in that is not from wikipedia - was: Re: A URI(Web ID) for the semantic web community as a foaf:Group

Hi danbri,


[snip]

> Also re SWIG, considered as a entity in the W3C world and as a larger
> vaguer community. Some W3C Interest Groups have enumerated
> memberships; traditionally RDF IG and its successor, this SemWeb IG,
> didn't. There is no master list, just a collection of SWIG-related
> mailing lists and other channels. I wonder sometimes about changing
> that, so we had a stronger sense of who the members of W3C SWIG
> actually are (ie. who has commited to the group's charter; also
> db-backed profile pages at w3.org, etc.). There are also data sources
> like the mail archives and #swig IRC logs (see
> http://swig.xmlhack.com/), Twitter/Identi.ca etc that offer some sense
> of who the active members of the community are. Also I made some
> experiments in http://danbri.org/words/2009/10/25/504 with exposing
> lists of OpenIDs from Wordpress, MediaWiki etc to show who is actively
> participating at some site. I think this evidence-driven approach is a
> stronger way of defining a network of overlapping foaf:Group
> descriptions, rather than having a single central list.

Yes, evidence-driven approach is very fancy and I like the idea. We'll  
eventually have a web of proof in the future, I believe.

However, you might have noticed that the linkings from these  
identifier (OpenID, e-mail address, IRC id) to WebIDs are missing or  
vague. For example, I couldn't find a obvious link from Tim's OpenID

     http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

to

     http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i

( <link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="Contact"  
href="card.rdf" /> is used but I wonder whether that is standard. Also  
remember it'll just be very hard to make many OpenID providers add  
these FOAF links. )

It would be very nice if your FOAF wiki accepts FOAF+SSL  
authentication so that we don't have to deal with the missing links.  
You might think there's link from WebID to OpenID and it's enough, but  
it isn't, especially for people we just want to collect data around us  
by crawling. We are not competent to crawl the whole Web.

For the case of IRC ids, there is actually a decentral way for linking  
IRC ids to WebIDs. If you /whois timbl or /whois kennyluck you'll find  
our WebIDs. But I wonder this semantic tweak on "Real Name" is a good  
idea or not. (Anyway, let's do it, shall we? I actually just did it 5  
mins ago while Tim's WebID is there for many years, I know.).  
Maintaing a central list might not be such a bad idea.

> There are lots of overlapping communities; being 'in the Semantic Web
> community' isn't a simple boolean flag. So I'd rather surface the
> underlying data and allow people to compose views into it that suit
> particular use cases - "find me things bookmarked by ontologists";
> "what have members of public-lod been saying on Twitter this week?",
> "Find me DOAP descriptions of software associated with members of the
> #swig IRC channel", "conferences with 2 or more editors of W3C SemWeb
> specs on the steering committee", etc etc...

I don't mind if <http://linkeddata.org/data#swig> means the foaf:Group  
of those who participate in the #swig IRC channel. I agree (or I hope)  
that in the future "Semantic Web People" would mean all human and  
maintaing such list will become meaningless. Again, the point is that  
we have to fill in the missing link. And I certainly doubt an approach  
like the one mentioned above ("Real Name" tweak) would be accepted in  
a satisfactory speed.

I sometimes think we are jumping too quick and we skip the RDF  
equivalent of the "making your homepage by FrontPage" phase, which I  
consider to be an important part in the development of the HTML Web.  
Human created RDF is important at this point, I think.

(Some Suggestions...)

bblfish & danbri,

You really should make DOAP for the projects you are working on. And  
you should add doap:developer reverse link from your WebIDs to the  
projects.

danbri,

You should mention

<http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf#danbri> is foaf:member of <http://danbri.org/words/#!aCommentApprovedTrustGroup 
 > .

in your FOAF. (Or maybe just rdfs:seeAlso <http://danbri.org/words/>  
and let owl:sameAs smushing does the rest. owl:sameAs smushing is not  
always on for some RDF systems though)

[snip]

Kenny