Nearly there

Mathematicians, boring as they are, have the cool Erdős number which measures how far away they are in the co-author graph from Paul Erdős, famous hobo mathematician. Actors have the Kevin Bacon number, which tells them how many steps they are away in the co-actor graph to Kevin Bacon, mediocre but apparently work-aholic actor.

In contrast, Web Science researchers have nothing more than the dubious honour of working in a field which needs to include “science” in its name, and on top of that have to struggle with the scruffy, chaotic, erroneous Web. Nothing too exciting here.

To make our dull work slightly more glamorous, I propose to introduce the “timbl number”, which tells people how many hops they are away in the foaf:knows graph from Web inventor and Semantic Web evangelist Tim Berners-Lee.

My timbl number recently dropped from three (via Richard Cyganiak) to two (via Christoph Bussler); I might be able to get another two-hop connection soon. My goal is to get a timbl number of one someday, i.e. Tim would state that he knows me in his FOAF file. Learn about the progress exclusively here on this blog!