State of the FOAF-sphere
The data quality on the Semantic Web improves. I’ve been crawling FOAF and RDF for a few years now, and the data available today is better, by leaps and bounds, than what it used to be. However, if the improvement continues at the current pace, it’ll be years before we get to something useful.
Building nice application on top of real-world data requires more or less connected data, i.e. shared use of URIs. Whilst schema-level URIs (in vocabularies such as FOAF and SIOC) are being used across many sources, instance-level agreement on URIs has still to happen.
While I prefer when different sources reuse common URIs to denote the same instance (a person, say), we’re smushing things based on OWL’s inverse functional properties. However, currently a lot of sources even don’t provide property values to smush on (e.g. friendfeed doesn’t provide homepage or email/email hashsum), which renders the current Semantic Web pretty much useless for real-world applications. Loads of islands and duplication of data, a grand mess.
Let’s hope over time sources provide keys that allow to fuse instance data from multiple sources, and people converge in their use of URIs. My URI, btw, is http://harth.org/andreas/foaf#ah if you want to add me to your FOAF file.
September 3rd, 2008 at 16:21
Hi, could you give me your opinion about http://www.foafdrive.com viewed with FF please ?
Thanks a lot in advance !
September 4th, 2008 at 11:30
Hi.
why you don’t use your email address as a URI? or your OPenID account? humm? Do you think it will change during life time? I argue that your URI could also change during the life time. It is not easy to follow.
How many people are reading this post to see your URI? Semantic Web is for machines. Right? So why I should parse your Weblog and find your URI and add it to my FOAF? It is a HUGE overhead for users. Users are lazy, nobody will add you like this.
Open your mind, think in a different way man!
September 4th, 2008 at 11:36
@Mglcel: Just my two cents…. It is nice, BUT it is yet another FOAF wizard. I have seen 4-5 more wizards doing the same job. Why do you think that Semantic Web is summarized in FOAF? Open your mind man! FOAF will not solve anything. Lots of problems at URI levels and keeping FOAF itself uptodate. Even inverse functional property is radiculous, as they are based on Email or other stuff.
September 4th, 2008 at 14:27
There’s little incentive for data providers to add semantic links or IFPs. It doesn’t make much practical difference if they do it or not.
I think the situation would improve if clients to something cool or useful with this information, or at least provide better feedback about the links.
I think that better clients (that can leverage high-quality data) are key to improving the Semantic Web right now, both in terms of data quality and increased adoption.
Search engines (both of the open web and intranet varieties) can be a big part of this.
September 4th, 2008 at 15:34
Hi Andreas,
Welcome to the Blogosphere!
I look forward to reading your posts and musings.
Ina
September 4th, 2008 at 23:33
Heya Ina,
thanks! Not to self: add Ina’s blog to my blogroll.
Andreas.
September 7th, 2008 at 21:15
@SW-researcher: “Why do you think that Semantic Web is summarized in FOAF? Open your mind man!”=> where have you found i’ve said such a thing ? I only see FOAF as one great semweb piece to do decentralized social networking… Twice you have wrotten ‘open your mind’ on this topic without giving us a little sample of your amazing lightening spirit, i am very impatient to listen to you now..