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May 8, 2006

FOAF and OPML

Filed under: opml

Fred from TalkDigger has an interesting post on FOAF profiles.

The idea is for each service you register with to ping your FOAF file, that way any updates to your profile (eg. move to another country) will happen automatically for every service you are registered with.

Since OPML is being used for a few different purposes, it could also be used for something like this, the service could subscribe to your OPML file/URL…all you ever have to do is update your OPML and everything does like wise.

I understand that FOAF is a dedicated service for social networks, but since people are becoming savvy with OPML, there’s no reason OPML can’t be used as simple profile.

Related:
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[ADDED 29/05/06: James Corbett is posting along the same lines]

2 Comments »

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  1. I think there’s a lot to Fred’s post, but a quick note on your comment:
    FOAF is far from being a dedicated service for social networks, it’s a vocabulary for describing people. Sure, the most interesting term is the A foaf:knows B relation. But terms from the vocabulary can be used wherever you want to talk about people, and the data is automatically compatible with any other RDF.

    “…there’s no reason OPML can’t be used as a simple profile”. Potentially yes, and a mapping could be made to FOAF/RDF just like it is with the XFN microformat (in fact microformat material can be directly interpreted as RDF, see micromodels.org).

    But OPML has a lot of practical issues, and support for the profiles would pretty much have to be built from scratch in OPML tools. Wouldn’t be my first choice of interchange format, XHTML or RDF/XML would make a better choice, IMHO - in the first case viewing of the profiles comes for free, in the second ease of use with RDF systems.

    Comment by Danny — May 8, 2006 @ 11:59 am

  2. PS. the BBC Programme Catalogue is a good example of FOAF being used outside of typical social networks, it uses the vocab to associate about a million people with the programmes they’ve appeared in.

    Comment by Danny — May 8, 2006 @ 12:04 pm

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