Re: [foaf-dev] Re: RDFAuth: an initial sketch

Peter Ansell wrote:
> On 01/04/2008, Toby A Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk> wrote:
>   
>>  Story Henry wrote:
>>
>>  > My feeling is that what is needed is to see how this could be made to
>>  > work better with SSL.
>> I've already posted a message suggesting an HTTPS-based solution.
>>
>>   Message-ID: <62649.81.2.120.180.1206622777.squirrel@goddamn.co.uk>
>>   Subject: Re: [foaf-dev] Re: privacy and open data
>>   Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:59:37 -0000 (UTC)
>>
>>  Summary:
>>
>>   1. Client requests public FOAF
>>   2. FOAF contains rdf:seeAlso with URI for HTTPS private FOAF
>>     
>
> Why does FOAF insist on making things non-specific with seeAlso. If
> you can make up a term that may be more understandable than ideally
> you should. Ie, foaf:restrictedVersion or something like that so
> someone knows why on earth they are following the URL and what they
> should expect to occur after that given their knowledge of the term.
>   
The original name for the FOAF project was RDFWeb, indicating that our 
focus was on generic-cross domain infrastructure, ie. linking together 
information about all kinds of things (people, organizations, places). 
The use of seeAlso was in that direction: it was something you could 
write a crawler for without even understanding the FOAF namespace.

I left some more notes on rdfs:seeAlso in 
http://esw.w3.org/topic/UsingSeeAlso after RDFCore WG decided not to 
attempt to tighten the definition of seeAlso.

The rise of RDFa and GRDDL makes it clear to me that this decision was 
the right one. However there are various techniques we can use to be 
more precise about the kinds of document we're linking to. We can put 
them into categories (eg. ResumeDocument; CalendarDocument, or we can 
indicate properties of them, eg. dc:format=application/rdf+xml

Agents considering dereferencing an URL can also poke at it via HTTP 
HEAD, to get an idea of the size; potentially we could expose more 
summary information that way too.

cheers,

Dan


ps. I see some people are using rdfweb-dev@vapours.rdfweb.org; sorry for 
the extra work, but could you please update addressbooks to 
foaf-dev@lists.foaf-project.org ... thanks!
--
http://danbri.org/

Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2008 13:29:24 UTC