Re: Socialnetworks of a person or organization

On 24 January 2014 09:34, Adrian Giurca <giurca@tu-cottbus.de> wrote:
> Dear Dan,
> Before being "follow" use case the capability to represent the social
> presence of a Person or Organization is a simple knowledge representation
> problem.
> The main use case is that million of web sites  shows of their first page
> their social presence by linking to their respective social accounts.
>
> Therefore we proposed two ways to encode this:
> 1. let http://schema.org/socialAccount be a property expecting a URL as
> value. Let update http://schema.org/Person and
> http://schema.org/Organization with this property. Then
>  webmasters would represent immediately what they look for, e.g.,
>
> <a itemprop="socialAccount" href="http://twitter.com/johndoe"
> class="icon-twitter">Follow Me on Twitter</a>
> <a itemprop="socialAccount" href="http://facebook.com/cocacola"
> class="icon-facebook">Facebook</a>
> ...
>
> 2. Let http://schema.org/SocialAccount be a type and
> http://schema.org/socialAccount be a property expecting URL or
> http://schema.org/SocialAccount as value. Then some, more experienced,
> webmasters would take advantage of the http://schema.org/SocialAccount
> properties inherited from http://schema.org/Thing.

So this is more or less the design FOAF settled on, with foaf:account
and :OnlineAccount.

In a schema.org-in-2014 setting, there are some natural questions:

What can be done with 'socialAccount' that we can't already do with
the 'url' and 'sameAs' properties?

What do we get from saying "this is a _social_ account"?  What kinds
of non-social account pages are excluded? What kinds of social but
non-account pages are excluded? Is an account/profile LinkedIn
primarily "social"? Flickr? someone's YouTube channel? a private
profile page on a closed site? Someone's homepage, blog or microblog,
selfhosted or hosted? Their MediaWiki e.g. Wikipedia user page? Public
bookmarks on pinboard.in? a Web page by some person? about that
person? Publicly editable by everyone including that person? And
FTP-able hosted (and public?) folder that the user can post arbitrary
content to? A page that contains content verified to have been
created/edited/checked by the person it describes, where that person
authenticated themselves using a different site?

The Web (and Internet) has always been social (c.f.
http://www.w3.org/Talks/Informing.ps‎ from 20+ years ago, excuse the
PostScript file format ), and Web sites (individually and as a whole
over the years) evolve fast. I'm not sure it is so easy to determine
which sites and services count as social, and which pages as social
accounts. So I lean towards trying to define just 'account', which
might be hard enough. I have some ideas but I'd rather listen for
now...

> Therefore, I see two issues here:
> a) If there is another better representation solution
> b) If there are enough use cases to describe social presence of an entity.

Yes, it's a reasonable design sketch for discussion.

cheers,

Dan

> Sincerey yours,
> Adrian Giurca
>
> On 1/23/2014 10:11 PM, Dan Brickley wrote:
>
> +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
>
>
> --
> -Adrian
> Twitter
> LinkedIn

Received on Friday, 24 January 2014 11:36:42 UTC