Re: Socialnetworks of a person or organization

+Cc: Libby

On 23 January 2014 14:55, Charles McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex-team.ru> wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 16:19:05 +0100, Stéphane Corlosquet
> <scorlosquet@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> +1 for some form of account type. What about UserAccount? SocialAccount
>> sounds a bit specific, in the sense that some accounts might not be
>> "social" but more like administrative (e.g. admin account). IMO
>> UserAccount is more generic and can account for both human / social
>> people, and also inanimate and/or fictional agents.
>
> Hmm. I think of this slightly differently and think maybe we should model it
> as Things (people mostly) being memberOf groups - and potentially also being
> author of or contributor to content (e.g. a social network feed of some
> kind).
>
> There are people who are *part* of an "account", and who have multiple
> presence in the same system - and more so for organisations.
>
> But I'm only at the beginning of thinking this through.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that this stuff is quite fiddly.

I can recap some experience from the FOAF project. We added an
OnlineAccount type there back ~ 2003,
http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-dev/2003-July/005588.html
  For OnlineAccount, http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/#term_OnlineAccount ...
plus a few properties.

The original name for the relationship between a Person (or foaf:Agent
e.g. foaf:Organization, foaf:Group) and their OnlineAccount(s) was
"holdsAccount". At some post-RDFa point we then aliased that to the
simpler name "account", and explored the idea that the identifier of
the instances of OnlineAccount would in most cases be an account page
on some site, which is also more or less what XFN does. The subtypes
of OnlineAccount were never used much afaik.

Looking back with retrospecs, just having a simple URL to an account
page e.g. http://twitter.com/danbri covers a lot. But breaking out
things like "the username associated with this account" can be useful
too. Another design is to have a kind of indirection and be describing
something like an addressbook entry in a package (vCard / PoCo
portablecontacts.net/draft-spec.html etc.) as distinct from the
general properties of the person/agent that hold it. Worth noting that
PoCo also has a simple 'account' construct, essentially a top level
domain + username + userid. This is basically the same model as FOAF's
OnlineAccount, which has accountName and accountServiceHomepage.

While you can do a lot of interesting things with a "Group"
construction (e.g. lists / circles, ...) I'm not sure yet about using
Group for accounts.

The general issue with all this is the need to flip/flop between
account-oriented and person-oriented information in quite a fluid way.
Sometimes you'll want to say "Dan knows Charles", other times that
https://twitter.com/danbri follows https://twitter.com/chaals; but to
always be providing information at both levels  can be painfully
verbose.

Stéphane - is this a concrete / practical issue for the Drupal
schema.org representation? If there are use cases and examples to
guide the discussion that would be very useful.

Dan

Received on Thursday, 23 January 2014 21:11:36 UTC