Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

FOAF: What Open Standards?

Get Tooled Up:'FOAF : Using open standards to support community building', Ariadne Issue 39/  Spotted by danny, this article wanders through a screen-shot-oriented overview of what one might do with a FOAF.  I can't tell exactly what open standards are being refered to.  (There are links and I will follow some.)  Mostly I have this "ick" reaction to the screen shots and maybe even the idea.  There is also a too-common "gee, look at these cool tools" along with "and it is extensible so it doesn't have to do everything (right)" sense I am getting from this.

I need to stand back farther and see ways of looking at community, and then what use one makes of a plumbing tool to maintain a particular communities existence for itself.  My first thought is that a community ought to grab a namespace and qualify the bejeezus out of familiar words, like "friend" or "associate." 

Then I would look at the idea that individuals assert their communities or their place in communities (with FOAF-like entries on their web sites) and see if that is a good way to do the job.  It is about as nicely decentralized as you can get, I'll grant that.

Finally, there are the dynamics of the game, including trolling around and reconciling the asserted community participation by analysis of these web-situated certificates attributable to the various actors.

Sounds like a half-dozen or so thesis projects, some of which are doubtless being breathlessly developed as we speak.
posted by Dennis at 5/6/2004 10:50:56 AM