Re: linking facebook data

Hello, 

Am cc'ing the foaf-dev mailing (sorry for cross posting)...

I just had a look at your fb graph API -> foaf rdf service[1], firstly cool stuff, but I have a few points I will address below. 

I recall Matthew Rowe[2] making a similar service a few years ago which spat out foaf data for a user's fb account, and I recall fb getting annoyed. Am guessing they mentally might have shifted since danbri's good work in getting them involve with SW tech  (great work once again by danbri ... *tonnes of applause), I guess we will find out soon ...

My point of reference is my facebook account, and the URI you mint of your service looks like so :  

http://sam.tw.rpi.edu/data/face/resource/mischat#me

Points: 

1. I would be nice if the person URI you mint, was explicitly a foaf:Person, e.g. : 

<http://sam.tw.rpi.edu/data/face/resource/mischat#me> a foaf:Person . 

2. The document URI could have a foaf:primaryTopic triple in there such as: 

<http://sam.tw.rpi.edu/data/face/resource/mischat> foaf:primaryTopic <http://sam.tw.rpi.edu/data/face/resource/mischat#me> .

Which in turn identifies which foaf:Person in the RDF document is a "main (wo)man" being defined. This would be useful in the case where the given user's friends are also listed in the document.

3. Ideally the document URI would be a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument such as : 

<http://sam.tw.rpi.edu/data/face/resource/mischat> a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument . 

4. Why didn't you make use of foaf:givenname and foaf:familyname which are spec'ed out in the foaf ontology[3], not a biggy but reuse is said to be the right thing™ todo :)

5. You could add an xsd:dateTime to the dcterms:created triple, as apposed to exposing the data as a plain text literal.

<http://sam.tw.rpi.edu/data/face/resource/mischat> dcterms:created "2010-04-27T12:42:11Z"^^xsd:dateTime .  

6. If i am not mistaken you could also get your hands on my fb avatar URI via the calls you make, that would be nice to see in your rdf.

But yeah, good work :)


Mischa *is happy that hardly any of my fb data is accessible via the fb graph API :)

[1] http://sam.tw.rpi.edu/ws/face_lod.html
[2] <mailto:m.rowe@dcs.shef.ac.uk>
[3] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
On 28 Apr 2010, at 15:02, Li Ding wrote:

> I just built a demo that provides dereferenable HTTP URIs (with
> RDF/XML data) for Facebook data using data retrieved from the recently
> announced  Graph API by Facebook.  see
> http://sam.tw.rpi.edu/ws/face_lod.html
> 
> In the demo, I observed inconsistent term usage between the Facebook
> data  API (JSON) and open graph protocol vocabulary. There is also
> some good potential to get the Facebook terms mapped to FOAF and
> DCterms terms. Please see my blog at
> http://tw.rpi.edu/weblog/2010/04/28/putting-open-facebook-data-into-linked-data-cloud/
> .
> 
> Comments are welcome.
> 
> best,
> 
> -- 
> Li Ding
> http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~dingl/
>