Re: FOAF Editor - was Re: WebID Frustration

Thanks Henry,
Interestingly, I didn't get a sense of what I need from http://my-profile.eu/ or http://data.fm/ .
And I don't really get it from http://stample.co/ (which I hadn't seen).
What I had in mind was more like Melvin's http://foaf.cc/ (which I have just been reminded of).
I think small but perfectly formed is the aim in a lot of this - things that do one thing well.
The sites you mention seem to want to draw me in to their social networking or keeping my data for me.
I spend a lot of my non-SemWeb life avoiding signing up for yet another site that wants to do those things, or give me yet another ID, and so I didn't even feel http://my-profile.eu/ was what I wanted - "Get a WebID Account" was not my aim. And in fact, it doesn't do much except create the WebID, as far as I can tell.
Maybe it is all presentation.
And maybe I am the only one that wants this.
But I have the feeling I would like to be able to point my friends at a simple site like FOAF Me was, that simply lets them create a document, and then tell me the WebID, so that I can use it for their identity.
Maybe Andrei will make that a variant of http://my-profile.eu/ ?
Or someone will pick up https://github.com/melvincarvalho/foafme and run with it (Melvin doesn't have the time).

It seems that FOAF Me (or whatever it should be called) is very much a piece of the sort of eye candy that I could give me friends that even http://my-profile.eu/ doesn't quite hit.

Cheers
Hugh

On 7 Aug 2013, at 13:10, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>
 wrote:

> 
> On 7 Aug 2013, at 13:08, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Norman, hello.
>> Very interesting.
>> Yes, I think that works.
>> I think I had got mislead into thinking the issuer was significant - especially as the one I created calls itself "Key from my-profile.eu", but of course I could change that in keychain.
>> I was sort of thinking of a FOAF service, which also just happens to do WebID if you click the WebID button (on by default, since people don't even need to know what it is?).
>> So, essentially the next generation of foaf-a-matic.
>> I'm sure I remember talking about this stuff many years ago :-), but maybe WebID makes it even more useful.
>> 
>> In some sense this is a way to get WebID more widely adopted - be in a symbiotic relationship with FOAF.
>> Because it also gets FOAF more widely adopted because it does the ID thing.
>> I'm guessing the WebID people have had all these discussions.
>> 
>> So the service would create and edit a Personal Profile Document for users.
>> It would look after it itself if you wanted, GET and PUT it on a third party if desired and possible, or give you the edited version to put somewhere yourself.
>> 
>> Personally I would love to have something better than vi to edit my FOAF, much as I love it :-)
> 
> Hi, that is what Andrei is building with http://my-profile.eu/ and what I am building at http://stample.co/ ( see also http://github.com/stample ),
> and a number of others are building such as http://data.fm/ , etc... The idea is to have a web server that is
> as easy to use as well known social networks but that is distributed and secure.
> 
> Henry
> 
>> 
>> Best
>> Hugh
>> 
>> On 6 Aug 2013, at 23:26, Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> Hugh, hello.
>>> 
>>> On 2013 Aug 6, at 22:58, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> 
>>> [...and quoting out of order...]
>>> 
>>>> I looked a quite a few sites before choosing where my OpenID would be.
>>> 
>>> So did I, but OpenID allows for some indirection, so that the OpenID that I quote -- <http://nxg.me.uk/norman/openid> -- isn't committed to a particular OpenID provider.  I use versignlabs.com, but could change away from them without disruption.
>>> 
>>> This is relevant because...
>>> 
>>>> Actually, this whole thing seems to me (I now realise) nothing to do with WedID per se.
>>>> It is about creating and editing FOAF files.
>>> 
>>> Aha, yes!  This is the key thing, I think.
>>> 
>>> So the question of how to get a WebID may reduce to the question of how to get a certificate which includes a 'good' X.509 Subject Alternative Name, with 'good' here meaning something like 'the FOAF file I (apparently or to my surprise) already have'.
>>> 
>>> Now, while there's a very small number who might want to do the whole thing from scratch, there's a larger number of people who might already have a FOAF file somewhere, and a still larger number of people (possibly all of Facebook? -- did they ever actually do this?) who have a FOAF profile but don't know it by that name.
>>> 
>>> As in...
>>> 
>>>> But actually I didn't; what I wanted was a WebID that didn't create an account somewhere (most of the sites I found offer an account that comes with a WebID as a side-effect).
>>> 
>>> So you want the inverse of this, in some loose sense.
>>> 
>>> What probably would work in this case is a service which allows two steps:
>>> 
>>> 1. You can say: I've got a preexisting account at Network X; can you give me a WebID which will point to that?
>>> 
>>> 2. The service says:  yes, they do FOAF, so (a) here's a WebID certificate which points to that, for you to put in your browser, and (b) tell Network X to do ... blah.
>>> 
>>> Step 1 is probably not toooo hard (especially if people can say "I've got this FNOF profile thing I've been told you tell you about").
>>> 
>>> Step 2a is still going to be fiddly (X.509 + browser = baldness), but I imagine that it's the 'blah' in step 2b that will require network by network cooperation.  Though all it would require is for the user to upload their new WebID certificate to the cooperating service for it to work out what the WebID is that it should add to the preexisting user's FOAF profile.
>>> 
>>> So you choose which network gets to edit and serve your FOAF file for you, and only have to mention that on one occasion, when talking to a make-me-a-WebID service.  You'd never have to go back to that WebID-creating service again.  In other words, unlike OpenID, you don't even need a redirection step.
>>> 
>>> Does that work?
>>> 
>>> All the best,
>>> 
>>> Norman
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
>>> SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>

Received on Wednesday, 7 August 2013 13:13:29 UTC