social software: automatic relationship clustering is a very interesting article over on d2r. It discusses using graph clustering techniques to identify groups within a social network. Diego suggests that adapting this to use FOAF ought to be straight-forward. As I noted in my critique of XFN plain old foaf:knows is a fairly limited relationship. It's … Continue reading Automatic Relationship Clustering →

This is the second article in the "Get Your FOAF On" series which provides some short overview of how to use various FOAF features. In this edition we'll look at the FOAF vocabulary elements for describing project as well as stating your involvement. Let's jump straight in with an example: <foaf:Project> <dc:title>My Pet Project</dc:title> <dc:description>A … Continue reading Get Your FOAF On: Projects →

This is the first in a series of short articles showcasing some of the capabilities of the FOAF and related vocabularies. The intention is to provide enough detail to show the expressive power of the existing properties and how they can be usefully mixed with other vocabularies. However I want to keep these examples simple … Continue reading Get Your FOAF On →

Along with my co-author, Brian Kelly, I've had a paper accepted for the IADIS 2004 - Web Based Communities conference. The paper discusses the role of FOAF and the Semantic Web in supporting community building, particularly at conferences. The HTML version of the paper is now online. We're intending to generate as much data as … Continue reading Using FOAF to Support Community Building →

I've had half an eye on the Share Your OPML as another possible source of FOAF data. I've been having scraping and converting various data sources to help faciliate interesting applications where possible. For instance this week I published some converted Freshmeat data, and in the past I've done various OPML conversions, e.g. for BloggerCon. … Continue reading Share Your OPML (maybe) →

Some interesting discussion has been triggered by Jon Udell's comments on FOAF. I agree with Edd and Dan that FOAF is about more than social networking and have said as much here on several occasions. Personally I see two problems with FOAF neither of them big. Firstly the name causes people to adopt certain expectations … Continue reading FOAF challenges →

Bryce Benton just posted to rdfweb-dev pointing out the arrival of XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and in particular a document from CSS-guru Eric Meyer constrasting XFN and FOAF. Thought I'd post a few thoughts and (hopefully) constructive comments. Firstly I'm impressed by it's elegance: annotate a few links with an extra attribute with values from … Continue reading XFN →

Dorothea recently wrote a rant about the RDF syntax in which she rails against the suggestion from some RDF advocates that the syntax is unimportant: it's the model that counts. Dorothea notes that: ...only a few people actually create models

My first interesting find via Minding the Planet which I added to my aggregator today courtesy of Dave Beckett is The Opte Project, "mapping the internet in a single day". No doubt everyone and their uncle have already seen this, but it's new to me. Some gorgeous graphs generated using Large Graph Layout, "a compendium … Continue reading Nice Big Graphs →