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.