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Could we use FOAF RDF to describe a HW group ?

Raphael Briner 1 year ago
Here is the FOAF: group  documentation. I don't see any definition regarding leadership of the group and moderation attributes.


For HyperWeek, we have 4 levels of membership: 

> Creator (full admin, owner, administrator)

> Editor (content admin and editor invitation, moderator)

> Member (other people (not C or E)

> Blocked member (can't put any more content, banned activity)

This separation is quite important if we want to display, edit roles and enable promoting and content moderation via an external service (via OAuth of course).

So my answer is quite straight forward: foaf:group  is uncomplete and the following workshop did not appeared to have resolved this issue 

There is a FOAF issue tracker associated with this FOAF term. A design goal is to make the most of W3C'sOWL language for representing group-membership criteria, while also making it easy to leverage existing groups and datasets available online (eg. buddylists, mailing list membership lists etc). Feedback on the current design is solicited! Should we consider using SPARQL queries instead, for example?

The solution, thanks to W3C and not FOAF, appears to be in SIOC, a newer RDF documentation:

SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) Core Ontology provides the main concepts and properties required to describe information from online communities (e.g., message boards, wikis, weblogs, etc.) on the Semantic Web. This document contains a detailed description of the SIOC Core Ontology.

We discover this kind of class that could be useful for FOAF.

Class: sioc:Role

Role - A Role is a function of a User within a scope of a particular Forum, Site, etc. 

in-range-of:sioc:has_function sioc:scope_of
in-domain-of:sioc:function_of sioc:has_scope


From a SIOC architecture, it begins with a community containing sites containing containers containing forums and posts

So in our case, the HW group would be not a container (no roles attributes) but a site

Roles are used to express functions or access control privileges that Users may have.

So apparently, the ideal is to mix SIOC with the other ontology FOAF. 

Effectively I can read it know on their homepage !

SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF. It has recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety of commercial and open-source software applications, and is commonly used in conjunction with the FOAF vocabulary for expressing personal profile and social networking information. By becoming a standard way for expressing user-generated content from such sites, SIOC enables new kinds of usage scenarios for online community site data, and allows innovative semantic applications to be built on top of the existing Social Web. 

Why I'm interested by this topic ?

I'm trying to better understand how well Semantic web is documented and accessible, how HyperWeek could apply it with success in our offering. Learning what Tim Berners-Lee wants to mean when he says "Decentralized socialnetworks".


Notable projects: 

Digg makes official its adoption of a 'semantic Web' standard

OSCF : Online semantic community framework 

SMOB is a distributed / decentralised microblogging system built on RDF and Semantic Web technologies, mainly SIOC and FOAF. Currently, we have simple prototypes of a publishing and an aggregating service, less than 100 lines of PHP code each.

Comments

  • avatar

    Raphael Briner 1 year ago

    There are different methods to decentralize content

    the most popular is manual: copy-paste a line of code containing a link to a widget (social or not)

    the "academic" buzz is on automation but tend to be not sustainable: URI, rdfs, micro-formats, etc

    In both cases, business can be done.
    Do you want that widget ? Pay it.
    Do you want to be connected to our extented portable informations ? Pay it.

    I see joint-ventures opportunities... The widget is more sustainable by its formal aspect: brandable, editable on params, etc

    A lot of europeans companies have revenues from specific sides:
    VPOD and their APIs
    Netvibes and their widgets
    etc

    I see telcoms looking for interoperabilities more than the web-side. They have to face a very fragmented device environment so they will be more willing not to face a crappy fragmented situation regarding data portability. The proof is the presence of Vodafone and Telecom Italia inside the W3C workshop.

    Concerning HW, we are focusing on Opensocial and FB for the moment. It's just important to have a clear vision of the roots of portability.
  • avatar

    Raphael Briner 1 year ago

    Sorry Yoan. Foaf is not sufficient according my little research. Isn'it ?

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