- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:12:29 +0200
- To: foaf-dev Friend of a <foaf-dev@lists.foaf-project.org>
- CC: Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
Hi folks (FOAF list and SemWeb IG), I gave an invited talk on monday, at a "Semantic Web perspectives" seminar in Dagstuhl in Germany. The title is thanks to Jim Hendler, "FOAF - the most used ontology in the history of the universe. How the hell did that happen?". Obviously I wouldn't propose such a grand title myself, and in fact I added an extra "?" in the middle, but it's true that FOAF has had massively more visibility outside the traditional ontology / knowledge representation community than most other efforts. So I gave a talk giving some fragmented history explaining something of what happened, some ideas about why/how, and some notes on problems and issues. Needless to say the slides were assembled late the night before. I didn't attempt an explicit "credits" slide, since so many of you contributed so much, I was fearful of missing people. For those of you I didn't namedrop, and those that I did, many thanks for all your hacking and enthusiasm! Slides are here (in Flash and Keynote, sorry; I'll work out other format exports somehow...): http://www.slideshare.net/danbri/dagstuhl-foaf-history-talk I'm not sure how much sense they'll make without my talk. Any thoughts/feedback welcomed on foaf-dev or wherever. The dynamics of how something can get so big with so few polished and end-user-benefiting apps are interesting, to say the least. It also had me re-visit the old mailing list archives back to mid-2000. Re-reading the original goals and use cases, http://www.foaf-project.org/original-intro ...in the light of recent SemWeb developments is also a strange experience. We have made so much progress, and yet the original use cases I mention are not entirely addressed yet: * "Find me today's web page recommendations made by people who work for Medical organisations". * "Find me recent publications by people I've co-authored documents with." * "Show me critiques of this web page, and the home pages of the author of that critique" * etc... Looking back it is clear these scenarios were grounded in early EU-funded work in the DESIRE project, where we had a bunch more similar "quality labelling"-related scenarios, see http://www.desire.org/html/research/deliverables/D3.1/ Now with POWDER, SKOS, SPARQL and RDFa in the technology enviroment, we can do quite a lot more than back in 2004-5 when FOAF was last actively evolving. In particular, SKOS and the Linked Data datasets I think really fill a gap: describing a person on their own is somewhat boring; describing them in the context of topics, places, content etc is much more fun... cheers, Dan
Received on Tuesday, 30 June 2009 19:13:09 UTC