January 17, 2003
Just what does knows mean?
I like what the foaf RDF experiment is trying to do. The concept of being able to share assorted bits of lists and knowledge about who you are and who you know is a pretty cool idea. What troubles me though is the lack of clarification on what a foaf:knows group actually means.
Just what does "knows" mean? Do I know the person as a lifelong friend? Are the a coworker, client, customer or just some shlub off the street? Do I know them as an aquantaince or is it more that I "know of them" via participating in certain social circles? I'd really like a way to make it less fuzzy.
I'd like to see a way to 'group' the people and define some semantics on that group. Maybe it's as simple as using things from HumanML, WordNet or Global WordNet in ways that help define what the group means. There may well be other bits of markup that are better suited, I'd certainly be interested in hearing about them.
There's a website that allows browsing WordNet. I did a query on the word 'membership' and got some interesting results. From membership it led to Social group, Assemblage, Group and Grouping. I followed into Social group and found Interest group which might be one way to describe how I know some of the foaf and RDF folks.
I suppose I'd indicate that I belong to or somehow know the group instead of just establishing a group of my own. I could then enhance what I truly know about individuals by having a link to them in my own groups. Thus I might indicate I'm a member of a given interest group. The interest group's own data would show me as a member. I'd then add a group of collaborators, perhaps, and put some people in it. I might even go so far as to mark up a foaf:Project as being associated with this collaborators group. This is undoubtedly more along the lines of what people want but can't do with foaf:knows as it currently stands.
I'm open to suggestions as to an easy way to leverage the foaf:knows contruct into something that conveys more meaning.
