For many years, the 24×7 IRC chatrooms #swig and #foaf (and previously #rdfig) have been logged to HTML and RDF by Dave Beckett’s IRC logging code. The RDF idiom used here dates from 2001 or so, and looks like this:

 <foaf:ChatChannel rdf:about=”irc://irc.freenode.net/swig”>
<foaf:chatEventList>
<rdf:Seq>
<rdf:li>
<foaf:chatEvent rdf:ID=”T00-05-11″>
<dc:date>2008-04-03T00:05:11Z</dc:date>

<dc:description>
danbri: do you know of good scutter data for playing with codepiction? would be fun to get back into that (esp. parallelization).
</dc:description>
<dc:creator>
<wn:Person foaf:nick=”kasei”/>
</dc:creator>
</foaf:chatEvent>

Dave has offered to make a one-time search-and-replace fix to the old logs, if we want to agree a new idiom. The main driver for this is that the old logs have a class for ‘chat event’  but use an initial lowercase later for the term, ie. ‘chatEvent’ instead of ‘ChatEvent’. None of these properties are yet documented in the FOAF schema, and since the data for this term is highly concentrated, and its maintainer has offered to change it, I suggest we document these FOAF terms as used, with the fix of having a class foaf:ChatEvent instead of foaf:chatEvent.

Almost all  RDF vocabularies stick to the rule of using initial lowercase letters for properties, and initial capitals for classes. This makes RDF easy to read for those who know this trick; consequently a lowercase class name can be very confusing, for experts and beginners alike. I’d therefore rather not introduce one into FOAF if it can be avoided. But I would like to document the IRC logging data format, and continue to use FOAF for it.

The markup also uses the wordnet:Person class from my old Wordnet 1.6 namespace (currently offline, but will be repaired eventually, albeit with a later Wordnet installation). This follows early FOAF practice, where we minimised terms and used Wordnet a lot more. I suggest Dave updates this to use foaf:Person instead. The dc:creator property used here might also use the new DC Terms notion of ‘creator’, since that flavour of ‘creator’ has a range of DC Terms “Agent” that is a more modern and FOAF-compatible idiom. This btw is a candidate for using instead of foaf:maker, which I introduced with some regret only because the old dc:creator property had such weak usage rules. But then if we change the DC namespace used for ‘creator’ here, should we change the other ones too? Hmm hmm hmm etc.

The main known consumer of this IRC log data is XSLT created and maintained by the ubiquitous Dave. If you know of other downstream consumer apps please let us know by commenting in the blog or by email.

While there are other ways in which such chatlogs might be represented in RDF (eg. SIOC, or using something linked to XMPP), let’s keep the scope of this change quite small. The goal is to make a minimal fix to the current archived instance data  and associated tools, so that the FOAF vocabulary it uses can be documented.

Comments welcomed…