August 10, 2003
Spheres of interest
Consider that you can use your Foaf file to make statements about what things are of interest to you. That way anyone pivoting through Foafspace would, in theory, be able to traverse along common lines of interest. So someone that might otherwise never appear on your Radar screen suddenly appears because of unexpected discoveries of like interests.
The key here is you have to make statements about what's of interest. And in order for me to understand that our interests are similar we'd need to use a common set of vocabularies. So if I'm interested in fiction, let's say, then it'd do some good to make use of a widely understood markup vocabulary for things related to fiction. Likewise, if I'm interested in a sports team then it'd be worthwhile to use a markup vocabulary that's popular in that realm.
Think about this, I mark up something with http://example.com/realm#interest and if you known to go looking for http://example.com/realm identifiers then you can hopefully find our like interests. Or you can pivot through my interest in fiction to other people I know (foaf:knows) and then along their lines of interest.
This is what the semantic web guys are talking about.
The trick is having those vocabularies understood by many different people, in many different languages. There are some things already done in these areas that will help. But at the moment, gardening calls... More on this tomorrow.
