Re: one-way sameAs and friendOf links

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 7:57 PM, Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org>wrote:

> I am trying to deal with the authority of sameAs and friendOf links.
> Of course, if I set up a website and on there claim to be 'sameAs'
> Bob, then a user search engine should not take that information as
> authoritative and add the information i publish to Bob's real profile.
> It should only trust outbound links.
>
> Same for friendship. If i claim to be a friend of Bob, then the search
> engine should interpret only that i am 'following' him. Only if Bob
> links back to me should it be displayed as a bidirectional friendship.
>
> This means we can't just take the "parent" identity as the main row in
> search results. Because anybody can add a parent to anybody else, and
> that way hijack their identity. But we also don't want to list one
> person 7 times simply because they have accounts on 7 different
> services/social tools. I find this a difficult problem to solve.
>

Would your service have its own state and user interface and allow people
to manually make connections between their different identities?

Or are you looking for a way to resolve this purely based on the data
that's already out there stored in the various service? In that case I
think the only way to reliably do this is to require reciprocal
links/pointers. Or maybe inverse functional properties as Kingsley says,
such as email address.


> Cheers,
> Michiel
>
>