danbri · December 21, 2023 21:26
diff --git a/gistfile1.txt b/gistfile1.txt

 # ETech 2004: Foaf session
 #
 # Dan Brickley - fear of a foaf planet
 #
 # abstract: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4757
 #
 # a pretty verbatim transcript, dropped some of the 'kindas' and suchlike]
 # thanks to dav for the movie. 
 #
 # danbri@rdfweb.org
 #
 # todo: transcribe Q+A, Edd's foafbot talk, link to slides etc.
 #
 #######################################################################


 Ok so i'm talking about this FOAF project -- friend of a friend project --
 Its been going behind the scenes since around 2000. I'm here with
 2 hats on really ... here as a W3C representative, where i spend my
 dayjob working on formal web standards... but i'm talking about a side
 project i've been working on with friends: "friend of a friend".

 [audience: try talking louder! etc.]

 friend of a friend project
 i just want a show of hands thing at the start
 how many of you have heard of xml?
 [lots]
 ...of rdf?
 [respectable]
 of foaf?
 interesting. how many of you have got foaf files?
 ...so, i'm suprised, that's a lot of files.

 So, what I really want to do is too many things at once here. 
 I want to talk a bit about FOAF as a technology... and most of its
 technical characteristics are inherited from its use of RDF, and its use
 of XML. I want to talk a bit about its social impact, and probably not 
 enough about either to really get into the interesting details.

 So... what is this foaf project? what can we do with FOAF files? and
 why do so many people seem to find it interesting? how do the
 technical and social aspects interrelate...? and where are we up to?

 The basic idea is pretty simple. It's machine readable homepages.

 Initially homepages for people, but also companies, organisations,
 anything that uses the Web. It's an exploration of the idea of a
 Semantic Web, a Web of machine-readable pages. It's an experiment in
 'just doing it' really. A few years ago... the first FOAF file was my
 homepage... the second FOAF file was my friend Libby's home page, and
 its just gone from there. Last week I heard that LiveJournal were
 about to switch on FOAF export, another 2 million FOAF pages
 about to be on the Web. So... it's interesting times...

 The two core concepts I think with FOAF are this notion of FOAF files or
 FOAF  profiles, RDF files in the Web. And the notion of FOAF as a
 vocabulary, as a kind of dictionary of terms you can use to say things 
 in FOAF files. So FOAF gives you markup for saying things like -- if
 you're talking about People -- their mailboxes, their homepages... For
 saying of a person what their workplaceHomepage is, which is a kind of
 nerdy way of saying where they work. A way of saying where they work
 that is quite easy for computers to deal with, so you can run queries
 against it to say, 'find me the weblogs of people who work for the place
 whose homepage is w3.org'. 

 The really interesting with FOAF is the really interesting thing 
 with the Web: connectivity. That my FOAF file has a reference to 
 Libby's FOAF file, which has a reference to Edd's,
 and so on and so on. So you can feed these things to a harvester, just
 in the same way that traditional harvesters traverse from page to page,
 but harvesters are indexing machine-readable assertions about the world,
 rather than just a list of words from human language. 

 So just to give a quick example... It's a bunch of angle brackets. It's
 some XML. I took this from a very nice article on XML.com that
 Leigh Dodds wrote last week... it says, this person, Peter Parker, [...] 
 has a foaf:gender property of 'male', a foaf:title of 'Mr', 
 it has given name and family name. It gives a hash of Peter
 Parker's mailbox, which is a kind of sneaky way identifying this person
 in the absence of a planet-wide identifier scheme, so, this person, with
 these details... they have a homepage, weblog, and they know another
 person... this markup at the bottom here. Peter Parker knows Harry
 Osborn; Harry Osborn has such'n'so homepage, and with respect to Harry,
 see-also this RDF file over here. And it's this little bit in bold
 that's really made this an interesting project to me. Once you've got
 that, that capacity for linking amongst machine-readable files, you've
 got the basis for scooping it all up and pushing it into a database.

 And what do you get when you do that? This [foafnaut slide] this is one
 of several visualisations and user interfaces that people have built
 with FOAF. Edd's going to talk about a textmode interface later. Just to
 give you a sense of the kind of data we've got. People, connected to
 people, by a variety of named relationships. People described in a
 variety of machine-readable files, and then arbitrary other
 characteristics of those people. And this is the really fun thing in
 terms of the structure of FOAF... we didn't in the FOAF specification
 nail down once and for all, what it is you can say about people. So,
 each of the people described can say as much or as little about
 themselves, about their colleagues and friends, as they choose to. 

 So what we're really trying to do here, was to take a thought experiment
 and roll it out and see what happens. What would it be like if machines
 could read our homepages? And, not wanting to wait for Artificial
 Intelligence or Natural Language Processing and so on, we took the
 approach of "dumbing down" self-descriptions to a level that is well
 suited to machine processing. So the next obvious question there is:
 well, what do we lose when we dumb down the subtleties of interpersonal
 relationships, the subtleties of self-description, into a
 machine-friendly form. This debate has come up again in the "social
 networking" discussions, where people present themselves through
 Friendster, through Orkut, for example. 

 And from a more geeky perspective, what might search engines evolve
 into, as we move from indexing the words in a page to indexing claims
 about the world. So we're trying to sneak up on the big hard problems,
 through a very simple technology. It is at heart just a file you put on
 a Web site, or a file that someone exposes from a service on your
 behalf.

 I've got some kinda wordy examples here, of the kind of things you 
 can say in FOAF. I can say... simplistic atomic statements about myself
 and other people. I can say, "I'm Dan, and I work at W3C, I know Libby
 who works at ILRT, and her FOAF profile is blah-blah-blah over here. 
 And here are the titles and descriptions of some documents we wrote
 together". Or I can say, "here's a photo I use on my homepage.
 Here's a bunch of other photos. And here are the people in those
 photos." 

 I can use any FOAF extension at all in these descriptions. And "FOAF
 extension" in this sense is any other RDF vocabulary that people have
 created for use within the RDF framework. So there are... maybe some of
 you here have heard of MusicBrainz, or Dublin Core, or Creative
 Commons. Each of those RDF applications gives you terms that you can
 plug into these descriptions. So if I want to talk about rights over
 these documents, use Creative Commons. If I want to talk about music, 
 eg. to say that "I really like Massive Attack", I use MusicBrainz. We
 try not to do too much in FOAF, and to come up with an architecture
 where we can plug in other people's work.
 

 So... my dayjob is acronyms. This is the acronym view. FOAF uses XML as
 a data format. It uses RDF as a data model, a set of conventions over
 the top of XML. It also uses this thing called OWL, the Web Ontology
 Language. I'm very pleased to say that both OWL and RDF became W3C
 recommendations yesterday, which is [clapping!] ... it's so nice to be
 able to say that, it's been years...

 So, this is a practical application of RDF and a practical application
 of OWL. The current FOAF spec defines 50 or so terms for talking about
 the world, for making very simple claims. And we use OWL [...] 
 for the following reasons. RDF, in a sense, guarantees the freedom of
 indepdent extension. Because we're describing people, because people are
 such interesting, complex, political beasts, there is no way that a
 single spec, written by a bunch of primarily technically oriented
 people, is really going to ever do a complete job of capturing the
 things you'd want to say of people. So what we try to do instead, was
 find a way of using RDF, so that other people's descriptive concerns
 could be plugged in there. So RDF guarantees that. It guarantees that a
 FOAF file can have arbitrary  other ways of talking about people in the
 file. 

 OWL provides us also with something pretty important. Algorithms for
 data merging.  If you think about the problem of independent parties
 scattered around the Web, trying to describe each other. There is no
 planet-wide identification system for people. There is no planet-wide
 identification system for companies, ... Despite that, what we need to
 do is to be able to fold data together from multiple sources, and figure
 out when they're talking about the same things. Without getting into the
 detail, that's really what OWL gives us a lot of off-the-shelf tools
 for.

 A quick recap. It's a new kind of Web page; it's a Web page for 
 machines. We try to echo the freedom and flexibility you have in your
 own homepage, in
 machine-readable form... that you might intuitively think that because
 it's machine-readable it's going to be kind of stilted, static, rigid,
 and ugly. It's a very low-tech approach, it's like RSS in the sense
 that, in its simplest form, it's just a page you put on a Web site. And
 we've got quite a long way with just putting pages on Web sites. But we
 run into issues that allow us to explore the harder things. So we've
 been PGP-signing these pages, for example, or encrypting them. It's a
 Web of files describing people, and webs of people. 

 I don't have time to get into the nitty-gritty of these issues, but the
 kind of things we've run into include the need to plan for lying, to
 plan for people being mischievous... If you remember the fuss at
 Friendster about "Fakesters". I don't know how many of you followed
 this, but on the Friendster site, people were creating playful cartoon
 characters, and they were being deleted because they weren't true
 descriptions of the world. In the FOAF universe, we just don't have that
 control. If you create a FOAF file, out there on the Web, and it
 describes Peter Parker, or Mr Benn, I can't delete that file, 'cos its
 on your Web server. So we need an architecture that allows us to survive
 with lies, survive with half-truths.  Anyone can say anything about
 anyone, using any RDF vocabulary. So there are etiquette issues there,
 there are privacy and politics issues there. We primarily use FOAF for
 self-description, but some of the lightning talks later will address its
 use in activism, where for example we might be talking about
 politicians. 

 FOAF increasingly gets lumped with this Social Networking thing. When we
 first started the FOAF project, a few years back, the big social
 networking site was Six Degrees. Last year the big social networking
 site was Friendster. Last week it was Orkut. Who knows what it'll be in
 6 months time. The driving ethic behind FOAF and a lot of this Semantic
 Web work is this sense that people want their data back, that they want
 control of their data, they want to be able to migrate it between
 hosting sites, to be able to host it themselves...  

 A good friend of mine was copying and pasting her profile from
 Friendster into Orkut last week. There's gotta be a be a better way,
 there really has. These sites they also partially describe the world,
 and present that as a full description of the world... so, "he's on
 Friendster, she's on Orkut...", they don't show up in each other's
 friends lists. To my mind, that's just wrong. There's one world, and we
 kind of stumble towards describing it. We sorely need import and export
 between these sites. And the way FOAF was designed, it gives you the
 basics for doing that. What we don't have in FOAF is a representation
 yet of all the nitty-gritty ratings, profiles, and "fan"
 characteristics that these sites use. We don't have a "dating"
 vocabulary. I'm kind of scared of adding one, but I'm sure it'll happen
 eventually. 

 Where are we up to today? I should have come here with stats. There is 
 a growing number of self-hosted foaf-a-matic generated files.
 Foaf-a-matic is a simple Javascript interface for describing yourself
 and linking to your friends. If see these funny little FOAF faces on a
 Web site that link to a FOAF file... there are a suprising number of
 them. People have gone to the foaf-a-matic site, created a self
 description, uploaded that to their site. On top of that there are an
 increasing number of services generating FOAF. So Ecademy, a business
 networking site in the UK. TypePad and Cocolog, the hosted version of
 Movable Type, they both produce and consume FOAF descriptions. Some
 interesting characteristics of what they've done there, which maybe we
 can talk about later. Live Journal, I heard last week, are about to
 switch on 2 million FOAF files. And we'll hear later about Tribe. 

 So... getting the data... it's _almost_ easy, a few lines of Perl code
 and suddenly there's 2 million more FOAF descriptions in the world. 

 Consuming the data is an interesting problem, and again this
 is something that distinguishes the approach we've taken from the
 approach of the monolithic aggregator sites. So you see FOAF user
 interfaces that use HTML, that use SVG for zooming around loads of
 people... Edd's going to talk about text-mode interfaces to it. It's a
 very interesting data set. There's a lot of it out there, a lot of it is
 public, and its there for anyone to play with. It's under nobody's
 control. You don't have to wait for the hosting site to hire some user
 interface designers. You can do a good job (or a bad job) yourself. 

 The other thing is... FOAF terminology... the little bits of language 
 that we defined in the FOAF spec, are being used in other RDF data
 formats. They describe people adequately enough, and the RDF design...
 tries to have a division of labour such that we don't duplicate things.
 If you're creating an RDF format, say for calendar exchange, and you
 want to talk about people, you can just plug in FOAF, you don't need to
 duplicate it.

 There's a couple of styles of using FOAF.
 There's a couple of styles of social networking sites. And we tried to
 architect FOAF to be neutral between them, although I think there are
 some cultural biases in the FOAF crowd towards one of them. 
 So, you can be very explicit in a FOAF file. I could say: "Edd's my
 friend",
 or I could say "Edd's my _best_ friend". Or I could say "Edd's my
 arch-nemesis". I could plug in any set of interpersonal relationships
 that someone else out there decides to make available.  
 That's a very... articulated, social networking site style of talking
 about sociality. 

 There's also, and my biases lean this way, a more kind of implicit,
 evidence-based approach. So we talk about: Liam and I work for the same
 organisation. Or... Libby and I went to the same school. The two of us
 co-authored a document, and so on. So you describe facts about the world
 which have associated with them implicit information about your
 relationships to someone. 

 There's quite a lot of work in the FOAF crowd on image metadata, I think
 because of this bias towards trying to humanise the
 machine-representation of interpersonal relationships. So we talk about
 'co-depiction', y'know, Edd and I are in the same photo. A lot of this
 stuff, it's processable by machines, you have to look at the picture to
 get the point.

 Applications... we're going to hear about in more detail in the
 lightning sessions, but there are a couple of favourites I have. 
 The connection of this stuff to locality... so... having the ability to
 scan the room to see who's there, with bluetooth or there's another
 application called FoafFinger that uses Rendevous to get the profiles,
 to get the weblogs, to get the most recent weblog articles written by 
 people who are with you in the room.

 If you've ever sat at the station, or been wandering around town
 wondering who all these people are, but not really wanting to ask them,
 there's quite an interesting application there.

 The activist side of things is my pet hobbyhorse, I think there's a
 whole separate talk there. One of our cuter apps is a dataset taken from
 theyrule.net, which describes webs of connections between boards of
 directors in the USA. I also wanted to mention DeanLink recently, the 
 database of activists on the Howard Dean campaign. There's an RDF view
 of that dataset, so you can scoop that up and see connections amongst
 people and collaborators there.

 People ask what's FOAF's _for_... I can gives use cases. The standard
 cheesy business traveller use case is: I'm a vegetarian, I always forget
 to tell the airport, tell the airlines that I'm vegetarian. You should
 be able to check in at the airport and have their machine read your
 homepage and go "Hey! You appear to be a vegetarian, but we don't have a
 special missing listed for you - is there something up here?" That's not
 rocket science.

 Basically, what is FOAF for? What is data for? Any FOAF file is just
 some RDF, it just contains statements about the world, whatever you
 might want to use that data for. That's why it's up there. So the
 vegetarian thing, is an arbitrarily picked use case. Whenever you want
 data, that's what FOAF's for.  So anything you can say in FOAF, you can
 ask of a crawl of harvested data. Whether you believe that data is a
 whole other topic...

 Just to recap. FOAF is designed really to be a freeform platform. 
 If you think back to the homepage, your homepage, it's a blank slate, 
 page... you can write what you like there. No-one tells you what you can
 write, no-one tells you which words you can use. We're trying to
 reproduce that for machines. It's out of control by design. We don't
 want to say what words you can use. We don't want to say where it has to
 be hosted. We don't want to own your data.

 I think the technical machinery, after a few year's work in the RDF
 community, is reasonably there. There are RDF crawlers, there are RDF
 data stores, there are query systems. There is no single way to deploy
 FOAF. We're really feeling our way around the options here. Whether it's
 hosted. Whether it's exported from something like LiveJournal. 

 We're on the borders of going mainstream. A few lines of code separate
 us from there being millions of these files. That seems kinda scary.
 Although I think we've got the technological aspects sorted, what we
 don't really have is a sense of the legal, privacy, etiquette issues.

 Within the closed world of say Orkut, you get this awkwardness of
 someone saying they're a fan of you, someone giving you 4 stars for
 sexyness... it's kinda unsettling for a lot of people. It's been
 unsettling for people to see the marital styles and sexual biases of
 their business colleagues. But it's been within the scope of a
 particular site. Now what happens when we take that and we scale it to
 the Web? We make it possible for you to say that about anyone, you don't
 have to log in on Orkut.... All the stuff we didn't have time to talk
 about...

 [end]

 Questions?

 [transcribe later]

	# ETech 2004: Foaf session
	#
	# Dan Brickley - fear of a foaf planet
	#
	# abstract: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4757
	#
	# a pretty verbatim transcript, dropped some of the 'kindas' and suchlike]
	# thanks to dav for the movie.
	#
	# danbri@rdfweb.org
	#
	# todo: transcribe Q+A, Edd's foafbot talk, link to slides etc.
	#
	#######################################################################


	Ok so i'm talking about this FOAF project -- friend of a friend project --
	Its been going behind the scenes since around 2000. I'm here with
	2 hats on really ... here as a W3C representative, where i spend my
	dayjob working on formal web standards... but i'm talking about a side
	project i've been working on with friends: "friend of a friend".

	[audience: try talking louder! etc.]

	friend of a friend project
	i just want a show of hands thing at the start
	how many of you have heard of xml?
	[lots]
	...of rdf?
	[respectable]
	of foaf?
	interesting. how many of you have got foaf files?
	...so, i'm suprised, that's a lot of files.

	So, what I really want to do is too many things at once here.
	I want to talk a bit about FOAF as a technology... and most of its
	technical characteristics are inherited from its use of RDF, and its use
	of XML. I want to talk a bit about its social impact, and probably not
	enough about either to really get into the interesting details.

	So... what is this foaf project? what can we do with FOAF files? and
	why do so many people seem to find it interesting? how do the
	technical and social aspects interrelate...? and where are we up to?

	The basic idea is pretty simple. It's machine readable homepages.

	Initially homepages for people, but also companies, organisations,
	anything that uses the Web. It's an exploration of the idea of a
	Semantic Web, a Web of machine-readable pages. It's an experiment in
	'just doing it' really. A few years ago... the first FOAF file was my
	homepage... the second FOAF file was my friend Libby's home page, and
	its just gone from there. Last week I heard that LiveJournal were
	about to switch on FOAF export, another 2 million FOAF pages
	about to be on the Web. So... it's interesting times...

	The two core concepts I think with FOAF are this notion of FOAF files or
	FOAF profiles, RDF files in the Web. And the notion of FOAF as a
	vocabulary, as a kind of dictionary of terms you can use to say things
	in FOAF files. So FOAF gives you markup for saying things like -- if
	you're talking about People -- their mailboxes, their homepages... For
	saying of a person what their workplaceHomepage is, which is a kind of
	nerdy way of saying where they work. A way of saying where they work
	that is quite easy for computers to deal with, so you can run queries
	against it to say, 'find me the weblogs of people who work for the place
	whose homepage is w3.org'.

	The really interesting with FOAF is the really interesting thing
	with the Web: connectivity. That my FOAF file has a reference to
	Libby's FOAF file, which has a reference to Edd's,
	and so on and so on. So you can feed these things to a harvester, just
	in the same way that traditional harvesters traverse from page to page,
	but harvesters are indexing machine-readable assertions about the world,
	rather than just a list of words from human language.

	So just to give a quick example... It's a bunch of angle brackets. It's
	some XML. I took this from a very nice article on XML.com that
	Leigh Dodds wrote last week... it says, this person, Peter Parker, [...]
	has a foaf:gender property of 'male', a foaf:title of 'Mr',
	it has given name and family name. It gives a hash of Peter
	Parker's mailbox, which is a kind of sneaky way identifying this person
	in the absence of a planet-wide identifier scheme, so, this person, with
	these details... they have a homepage, weblog, and they know another
	person... this markup at the bottom here. Peter Parker knows Harry
	Osborn; Harry Osborn has such'n'so homepage, and with respect to Harry,
	see-also this RDF file over here. And it's this little bit in bold
	that's really made this an interesting project to me. Once you've got
	that, that capacity for linking amongst machine-readable files, you've
	got the basis for scooping it all up and pushing it into a database.

	And what do you get when you do that? This [foafnaut slide] this is one
	of several visualisations and user interfaces that people have built
	with FOAF. Edd's going to talk about a textmode interface later. Just to
	give you a sense of the kind of data we've got. People, connected to
	people, by a variety of named relationships. People described in a
	variety of machine-readable files, and then arbitrary other
	characteristics of those people. And this is the really fun thing in
	terms of the structure of FOAF... we didn't in the FOAF specification
	nail down once and for all, what it is you can say about people. So,
	each of the people described can say as much or as little about
	themselves, about their colleagues and friends, as they choose to.

	So what we're really trying to do here, was to take a thought experiment
	and roll it out and see what happens. What would it be like if machines
	could read our homepages? And, not wanting to wait for Artificial
	Intelligence or Natural Language Processing and so on, we took the
	approach of "dumbing down" self-descriptions to a level that is well
	suited to machine processing. So the next obvious question there is:
	well, what do we lose when we dumb down the subtleties of interpersonal
	relationships, the subtleties of self-description, into a
	machine-friendly form. This debate has come up again in the "social
	networking" discussions, where people present themselves through
	Friendster, through Orkut, for example.

	And from a more geeky perspective, what might search engines evolve
	into, as we move from indexing the words in a page to indexing claims
	about the world. So we're trying to sneak up on the big hard problems,
	through a very simple technology. It is at heart just a file you put on
	a Web site, or a file that someone exposes from a service on your
	behalf.

	I've got some kinda wordy examples here, of the kind of things you
	can say in FOAF. I can say... simplistic atomic statements about myself
	and other people. I can say, "I'm Dan, and I work at W3C, I know Libby
	who works at ILRT, and her FOAF profile is blah-blah-blah over here.
	And here are the titles and descriptions of some documents we wrote
	together". Or I can say, "here's a photo I use on my homepage.
	Here's a bunch of other photos. And here are the people in those
	photos."

	I can use any FOAF extension at all in these descriptions. And "FOAF
	extension" in this sense is any other RDF vocabulary that people have
	created for use within the RDF framework. So there are... maybe some of
	you here have heard of MusicBrainz, or Dublin Core, or Creative
	Commons. Each of those RDF applications gives you terms that you can
	plug into these descriptions. So if I want to talk about rights over
	these documents, use Creative Commons. If I want to talk about music,
	eg. to say that "I really like Massive Attack", I use MusicBrainz. We
	try not to do too much in FOAF, and to come up with an architecture
	where we can plug in other people's work.


	So... my dayjob is acronyms. This is the acronym view. FOAF uses XML as
	a data format. It uses RDF as a data model, a set of conventions over
	the top of XML. It also uses this thing called OWL, the Web Ontology
	Language. I'm very pleased to say that both OWL and RDF became W3C
	recommendations yesterday, which is [clapping!] ... it's so nice to be
	able to say that, it's been years...

	So, this is a practical application of RDF and a practical application
	of OWL. The current FOAF spec defines 50 or so terms for talking about
	the world, for making very simple claims. And we use OWL [...]
	for the following reasons. RDF, in a sense, guarantees the freedom of
	indepdent extension. Because we're describing people, because people are
	such interesting, complex, political beasts, there is no way that a
	single spec, written by a bunch of primarily technically oriented
	people, is really going to ever do a complete job of capturing the
	things you'd want to say of people. So what we try to do instead, was
	find a way of using RDF, so that other people's descriptive concerns
	could be plugged in there. So RDF guarantees that. It guarantees that a
	FOAF file can have arbitrary other ways of talking about people in the
	file.

	OWL provides us also with something pretty important. Algorithms for
	data merging. If you think about the problem of independent parties
	scattered around the Web, trying to describe each other. There is no
	planet-wide identification system for people. There is no planet-wide
	identification system for companies, ... Despite that, what we need to
	do is to be able to fold data together from multiple sources, and figure
	out when they're talking about the same things. Without getting into the
	detail, that's really what OWL gives us a lot of off-the-shelf tools
	for.

	A quick recap. It's a new kind of Web page; it's a Web page for
	machines. We try to echo the freedom and flexibility you have in your
	own homepage, in
	machine-readable form... that you might intuitively think that because
	it's machine-readable it's going to be kind of stilted, static, rigid,
	and ugly. It's a very low-tech approach, it's like RSS in the sense
	that, in its simplest form, it's just a page you put on a Web site. And
	we've got quite a long way with just putting pages on Web sites. But we
	run into issues that allow us to explore the harder things. So we've
	been PGP-signing these pages, for example, or encrypting them. It's a
	Web of files describing people, and webs of people.

	I don't have time to get into the nitty-gritty of these issues, but the
	kind of things we've run into include the need to plan for lying, to
	plan for people being mischievous... If you remember the fuss at
	Friendster about "Fakesters". I don't know how many of you followed
	this, but on the Friendster site, people were creating playful cartoon
	characters, and they were being deleted because they weren't true
	descriptions of the world. In the FOAF universe, we just don't have that
	control. If you create a FOAF file, out there on the Web, and it
	describes Peter Parker, or Mr Benn, I can't delete that file, 'cos its
	on your Web server. So we need an architecture that allows us to survive
	with lies, survive with half-truths. Anyone can say anything about
	anyone, using any RDF vocabulary. So there are etiquette issues there,
	there are privacy and politics issues there. We primarily use FOAF for
	self-description, but some of the lightning talks later will address its
	use in activism, where for example we might be talking about
	politicians.

	FOAF increasingly gets lumped with this Social Networking thing. When we
	first started the FOAF project, a few years back, the big social
	networking site was Six Degrees. Last year the big social networking
	site was Friendster. Last week it was Orkut. Who knows what it'll be in
	6 months time. The driving ethic behind FOAF and a lot of this Semantic
	Web work is this sense that people want their data back, that they want
	control of their data, they want to be able to migrate it between
	hosting sites, to be able to host it themselves...

	A good friend of mine was copying and pasting her profile from
	Friendster into Orkut last week. There's gotta be a be a better way,
	there really has. These sites they also partially describe the world,
	and present that as a full description of the world... so, "he's on
	Friendster, she's on Orkut...", they don't show up in each other's
	friends lists. To my mind, that's just wrong. There's one world, and we
	kind of stumble towards describing it. We sorely need import and export
	between these sites. And the way FOAF was designed, it gives you the
	basics for doing that. What we don't have in FOAF is a representation
	yet of all the nitty-gritty ratings, profiles, and "fan"
	characteristics that these sites use. We don't have a "dating"
	vocabulary. I'm kind of scared of adding one, but I'm sure it'll happen
	eventually.

	Where are we up to today? I should have come here with stats. There is
	a growing number of self-hosted foaf-a-matic generated files.
	Foaf-a-matic is a simple Javascript interface for describing yourself
	and linking to your friends. If see these funny little FOAF faces on a
	Web site that link to a FOAF file... there are a suprising number of
	them. People have gone to the foaf-a-matic site, created a self
	description, uploaded that to their site. On top of that there are an
	increasing number of services generating FOAF. So Ecademy, a business
	networking site in the UK. TypePad and Cocolog, the hosted version of
	Movable Type, they both produce and consume FOAF descriptions. Some
	interesting characteristics of what they've done there, which maybe we
	can talk about later. Live Journal, I heard last week, are about to
	switch on 2 million FOAF files. And we'll hear later about Tribe.

	So... getting the data... it's _almost_ easy, a few lines of Perl code
	and suddenly there's 2 million more FOAF descriptions in the world.

	Consuming the data is an interesting problem, and again this
	is something that distinguishes the approach we've taken from the
	approach of the monolithic aggregator sites. So you see FOAF user
	interfaces that use HTML, that use SVG for zooming around loads of
	people... Edd's going to talk about text-mode interfaces to it. It's a
	very interesting data set. There's a lot of it out there, a lot of it is
	public, and its there for anyone to play with. It's under nobody's
	control. You don't have to wait for the hosting site to hire some user
	interface designers. You can do a good job (or a bad job) yourself.

	The other thing is... FOAF terminology... the little bits of language
	that we defined in the FOAF spec, are being used in other RDF data
	formats. They describe people adequately enough, and the RDF design...
	tries to have a division of labour such that we don't duplicate things.
	If you're creating an RDF format, say for calendar exchange, and you
	want to talk about people, you can just plug in FOAF, you don't need to
	duplicate it.

	There's a couple of styles of using FOAF.
	There's a couple of styles of social networking sites. And we tried to
	architect FOAF to be neutral between them, although I think there are
	some cultural biases in the FOAF crowd towards one of them.
	So, you can be very explicit in a FOAF file. I could say: "Edd's my
	friend",
	or I could say "Edd's my _best_ friend". Or I could say "Edd's my
	arch-nemesis". I could plug in any set of interpersonal relationships
	that someone else out there decides to make available.
	That's a very... articulated, social networking site style of talking
	about sociality.

	There's also, and my biases lean this way, a more kind of implicit,
	evidence-based approach. So we talk about: Liam and I work for the same
	organisation. Or... Libby and I went to the same school. The two of us
	co-authored a document, and so on. So you describe facts about the world
	which have associated with them implicit information about your
	relationships to someone.

	There's quite a lot of work in the FOAF crowd on image metadata, I think
	because of this bias towards trying to humanise the
	machine-representation of interpersonal relationships. So we talk about
	'co-depiction', y'know, Edd and I are in the same photo. A lot of this
	stuff, it's processable by machines, you have to look at the picture to
	get the point.

	Applications... we're going to hear about in more detail in the
	lightning sessions, but there are a couple of favourites I have.
	The connection of this stuff to locality... so... having the ability to
	scan the room to see who's there, with bluetooth or there's another
	application called FoafFinger that uses Rendevous to get the profiles,
	to get the weblogs, to get the most recent weblog articles written by
	people who are with you in the room.

	If you've ever sat at the station, or been wandering around town
	wondering who all these people are, but not really wanting to ask them,
	there's quite an interesting application there.

	The activist side of things is my pet hobbyhorse, I think there's a
	whole separate talk there. One of our cuter apps is a dataset taken from
	theyrule.net, which describes webs of connections between boards of
	directors in the USA. I also wanted to mention DeanLink recently, the
	database of activists on the Howard Dean campaign. There's an RDF view
	of that dataset, so you can scoop that up and see connections amongst
	people and collaborators there.

	People ask what's FOAF's _for_... I can gives use cases. The standard
	cheesy business traveller use case is: I'm a vegetarian, I always forget
	to tell the airport, tell the airlines that I'm vegetarian. You should
	be able to check in at the airport and have their machine read your
	homepage and go "Hey! You appear to be a vegetarian, but we don't have a
	special missing listed for you - is there something up here?" That's not
	rocket science.

	Basically, what is FOAF for? What is data for? Any FOAF file is just
	some RDF, it just contains statements about the world, whatever you
	might want to use that data for. That's why it's up there. So the
	vegetarian thing, is an arbitrarily picked use case. Whenever you want
	data, that's what FOAF's for. So anything you can say in FOAF, you can
	ask of a crawl of harvested data. Whether you believe that data is a
	whole other topic...

	Just to recap. FOAF is designed really to be a freeform platform.
	If you think back to the homepage, your homepage, it's a blank slate,
	page... you can write what you like there. No-one tells you what you can
	write, no-one tells you which words you can use. We're trying to
	reproduce that for machines. It's out of control by design. We don't
	want to say what words you can use. We don't want to say where it has to
	be hosted. We don't want to own your data.

	I think the technical machinery, after a few year's work in the RDF
	community, is reasonably there. There are RDF crawlers, there are RDF
	data stores, there are query systems. There is no single way to deploy
	FOAF. We're really feeling our way around the options here. Whether it's
	hosted. Whether it's exported from something like LiveJournal.

	We're on the borders of going mainstream. A few lines of code separate
	us from there being millions of these files. That seems kinda scary.
	Although I think we've got the technological aspects sorted, what we
	don't really have is a sense of the legal, privacy, etiquette issues.

	Within the closed world of say Orkut, you get this awkwardness of
	someone saying they're a fan of you, someone giving you 4 stars for
	sexyness... it's kinda unsettling for a lot of people. It's been
	unsettling for people to see the marital styles and sexual biases of
	their business colleagues. But it's been within the scope of a
	particular site. Now what happens when we take that and we scale it to
	the Web? We make it possible for you to say that about anyone, you don't
	have to log in on Orkut.... All the stuff we didn't have time to talk
	about...

	[end]

	Questions?

	[transcribe later]