ChrisScott.org

Ok. So in the last post I was talking about how I created an RDF graph to describe myself and found that I’d entered into a huge rambling geekfest about the design of the FOAF vocabluary. So, I decided to cut all of that out and post it here separately. For context, it follows directly from having created this RDF document. If your interested read on…

From that experience, of creating my own RDF graph, I had only one hiccup: using the FOAF vocabulary, while it is relatively simple to define a group (such as the company which employs you) and list its members (in that case, staff), it seems impossible to do it the other way around. Essentially, you cannot say “I work for OpenText” but can say “OpenText employs me”. I do understand why this is, though: it is fairly standard for predicates to assume ahas relationship not an is one (#me has foaf:name Chris, not is foaf:name Chris), and standards are essential for Linked Data to work.

You may think that the problem described above sounds pretty irrelevant (you may be right: read on), so let me run through my thought process:

Imagine two graphs, one describing me and one describing OpenText. In the OpenText graph there is a list of employees (as there is on Freebase) which include a reference to my graph. You could, then, search (for the purpose of an example) for the weblogs of OpenText employees fairly successfully. If, however, you were using my graph, you couldn’t find a list of colleagues of mine because I couldn’t add “Chris is employed by OpenText” to then graph and, hence, the two could not be connected.

Someone obviously agreed with that assessment as I discovered the RoleVocab vocabulary on the FOAF wiki. I used that vocab in my person profile document to assert that “Chris has a role in the organization OpenText”.

With hindsight, I think that might have been a mistake, though. My mind-frame was trapped in the resource – the me. Perhaps I should have been thinking about the whole RDF graph. Why couldn’t I include a separate resource about OpenText which only included my employment? Well, because the domain of the foaf:member property is foaf:Group and the foaf:Organization type is a direct subclass of foaf:Agent. Essentially, the foaf vocabulary is saying that you can only be a member of a group and not an organization. Personally, I think that the most semantically correct way around this issue would be to make foaf:Organization a subClass of foaf:Group or, failing that, foaf:Organization could be added as a second rdfs:domain property of foaf:member…. I may make the suggestion.

In the meantime, I’ve also added an OWL Object Property to the top of my RDF document which describes the predicate”employee”, as in “OpenText has employee Chris”.

So: apologies for the geeky and rambling post and please let me know your thoughts on the whole “Group has member Person”/”Person participates in Group” conundrum.

That’s right. About a fortnight ago I decided it was about time to practice what I preach (well, specifically what I was due to preach at last weeks excellent ePublishing Innovation Forum) and get myself onto the Semantic Web. For those new to the concept of the Semantic Web, I’m talking about creating an RDF graph which includes a resource describing me.

So, without further ado, here I am:

http://chrisscott.org/about/card#me

The document at the end of that link is a FOAF Personal Profile Document. As you can see, the URI above includes the fragment “me”. This is a fairly important part of the Linked Data concept as it allows one of the axioms, that the URI is dereferenceable, whilst also identifying a resource, “me”, which can be used to link the graph to others. So, if you are curious, take a look at my personal profile and check out the “me” resource – it’s pretty simplistic but a good starting point.

So, how did I go about creating my personal profile on the Semantic Web? Well I started with a step I urge everyone to do: I signed up to the Opera community. You can do the same here. Once you’ve done that you can go to your profile and click on the “FOAF” link on the right hand side of the footer:

My profile page in the Opera community.

That’s the quickest and easiest way to get yourself represented on the Semantic Web but for me Opera do not give you enough control. For example, I cannot use the foaf:weblog predicate to point to this blog, only the one which Opera host for me (that said, they do support the rdfs:seeAlso predicate so my private personal profile is referenced by my Opera one). For that reason, I took the XML generated for my Opera community profile, tweaked it a bit and uploaded it onto this domain.

Give it a go! I’d love to hear how people get on…

NB: I ended up going on a bit in the draft of this post about the FOAF vocab design and got a bit technical, so I’ve seperated that content off into this post.