danbri’s foaf stories

Another day, another massive leak of hosted personal photos. They’re probably being crawled by fake dating sites as I type this.

“Meet these girls from $geoipdb.UserLocationFromIPAddress() now!“, etc.

They’ll probably end up in bittorrent too, alongside the recent Myspace leaked photos.

I’ve lately started writing up and prototyping around a use-case for the “Group” construct in FOAF and for medium-sized, partially private data aggregators like SparqlPress. I think we can do something interesting to deal with the social pressure and information load people are experiencing on sites like Flickr and Twitter.

Often people have rather large lists of friends, contacts or buddys - publically visible lists - which play a variety of roles in their online life. Sometimes these roles are in tension. Flickr, for example, allow their users to mark some of their contacts as “friend” or “family” (or both). Real life isn’t so simple, however. And the fact that this classification is shared (in Flickr’s case with everyone) makes for a potentially awkward dynamic. Do you really want to tell everyone you know whether they are a full “friend” or a mere “contact”? Let alone keep this information up to date on every social site that hosts it. I’ve heard a good few folk complain about the stress of adding yet another entry to their list of “twitter follows” people.  Their lists are often already huge through some sense of social obligation to reciprocate. I think it’s worth exploring some alternative filtering and grouping mechanisms.

On the one hand, we have people “bookmarking” people they find interesting, or want to stay in touch with, or “get to know better”. On the other, we have the bookmarked party sometimes reciprocating those actions because they feel it polite; a situation complicated by crude categories like “friend” versus “contact”. What makes this a particularly troublesome combination is when user-facing features, such as “updates from your buddies” or “photos from your friends/contacts” are built on top of these buddylists.

Take my own case on Flickr, I’m probably not typical, but I’m a use case I care about. I have made no real consistent use of the “friend” versus “contact” distinction; to even attempt do so would be massively time consuming, and also a bit silly. There are all kinds of great people on my Flickr contacts list. Some I know really well, some I barely know but admire their photography, etc. It seems currently my Flickr account has 7 “family”, 79 “friends” and 604 “contacts”.

Now to be clear, I’m not grumbling about Flickr. Flickr is a work of genius, no nitpicking. What I ask for is something that goes beyond what Flickr alone can do. I’d like a better way of seeing updates from friends and contacts. This is just a specific case of a general thing (eg. RSS/Atom feed management), but let’s stay specific for now.

Currently, my Flickr email notification settings are:

• When people comment on your photos: Yes
• When your friends and family upload new photos: Yes (daily digest)
• When your other contacts upload new photos: No

What this means is that I selected to see notifications photos from those 86 people who I haveflagged as “friend” or “family”. And I chose not to be notified of new photos from the other 604 contacts. Even though that list contains many people I know, and would like to know better. The usability question here is: how can we offer more subtlety in this mechanism, without overwhelming users with detail? My guess is that we approach this by collecting in a more personal environment some information that users might not want to state publically in an online profile. So a desktop (or weblog, e.g. SparqlPress) aggregation of information from addressbooks, email send/receive patterns, weblog commenting behaviours, machine readable resumes, … real evidence of real connections between real people.

And so I’ve been mining around for sources of “foaf:Group” data. As a work in progress testbed I have a list of OpenIDs of people whose comments I’ve approved in my blog. And another, of people who have worked on the FOAF wiki. I’ve been looking at the machine readable data from W3C’s Tech Reports digital archive too, as that provides information about a network of collaboration going back to the early days of the Web (and it’s available in RDF). I also want to integrate my sent-mail logs, to generate another group, and extract more still from my addressbook. On top of this of course I have access to the usual pile of FOAF and XFN, scraped or API-extracted information from social network sites and IM accounts. Rather than publish it all for the world to see, the idea here is to use it to generate simple personal-use user interfaces couched in terms of these groups. So, hopefully I shall be able to use those groups as a filter against the 600+ members of my flickr buddylist, and make some kind of basic RSS-filtered view of their photos.

If this succeeds, it may help people to have huge buddylists without feeling they’ve betrayed their “real friends” by doing so, or forcing them to put their friends into crudely labelled public buckets marked “real friend” and “mere contact”. The core FOAF design principle here is our longstanding bias towards evidence-based rather than proclaimed information.  Don’t just ask people to tell you who their friends are, and how close the relationship is (especially in public, and most especially in a format that can be imported into spreadsheets for analysis). Instead… take the approach of  “don’t say it, show it“. Create tools based on the evidence that friendship and collaboration leaves in the Web. The public Web, but also the bits that don’t show up in Google, and hopefully never will. If we can find a way to combine all that behind a simple UI, it might go a little way towards “waving not drowning” in information.

Much of this is stating the obvious, but I thought I’d leave the nerdly details of SPARQL and FOAF/RDF for another post.

Instead here’s a pointer to a Scoble article on Mr Facebook, where they’re grappling with similar issues but from a massive aggregation rather than decentralised perspective:

Facebook has a limitation on the number of friends a person can have, which is 4,999 friends. He says that was due to scaling/technical issues and they are working on getting rid of that limitation. Partly to make it possible to have celebrities on Facebook but also to make it possible to have more grouping kinds of features. He told me many members were getting thousands of friends and that those users are also asking for many more features to put their friends into different groups. He expects to see improvements in that area this year.

ps. anyone know if Facebook group membership data is accessible through their APIs? I know I can get group data from LiveJournal and from My Opera in FOAF, but would be cool to mix in Facebook too.

Latest megasite privacy screwup, this time from MySpace who appear to have allowed users to consider photos “private” when associated with a private profile, while (as far as I can make out) have the URLs visible of guessable. Whoopsadaisy.  Predictably enough someone has crawled and shared many of the images. Wired reports that the site knew about the flaw for months, and didn’t address it. I hope that’s not true.

According to Simon Willison, Flickr look set to support OpenID by allowing your photostream URL (eg. for me, http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/) to serve as an OpenID, ie. something you can type wherever you see “login using OpenID” and be bounced to Flickr/Yahoo to provide credentials instead of remembering yet another password. This is rather good news.

For the portability-minded, it’s worth remembering that OpenID lets you put markup in your own Web page to devolve to such services. So my main OpenID is “danbri.org” , which is a document I control, on a domain that I own. In the HTML header I have the following markup:


<link rel=“meta” type=“application/rdf+xml” title=“FOAF” href=“http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf” />
<link rel=“openid.server” href=“http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml” />
<link rel=“openid.delegate” href=“http://danbri.livejournal.com/” />


…which is enough to defer the details of being an OpenID provider to LiveJournal (thanks, LiveJournal!). Flickr are about to join the group of sites you can use in this way, it seems.

As an aside, this means that the security of our own websites becomes yet more important. Last summer, DreamHost (my webhosting provider) were compromised, and my own homepage was briefly decorated with viagra spam. Fortunately they didn’t touch seem to touch the OpenID markup, but you can see the risk. That’s the price of portability here. As Simon points out, we’ll probably all have several active OpenIDs, and there’s no need to host your own, just as there’s no need for people who want to publish online to buy and host their own domains or HTML sites.

The Flickr implementation, coupled with their existing API, means we could all offer things like “log into my personal site for family (or friends)” and defer buddylist - and FOAF - management to the well-designed Flickr site, assuming all your friends or family have Flickr accounts. Implementing this in a way that works with other providers (eg. LJ) is left as an excercise for the reader ;)

I’ve always found HTML imagemaps to be a curiously neglected technology. They seem somehow to evoke the Web of the mid-to-late 90s, to be terribly ‘1.0′. But there’s glue in the old horse yet…

A client-side HTML imagemap lets you associate links (and via Javascript, behaviour) with regions of an image. As such, they’re a form of image metadata that can have applications including image search, Web accessibility and social networking. They’re also a poor cousin to the Web’s new vector image format, SVG. This morning I dug out some old work on this (much of which from Max, Libby, Jim all of whom btw are currently working at Joost; as am I, albeit part-time).

The first hurdle you hit when you want to play with HTML imagemaps is finding an editor that produces them. The fact that my blog post asking for MacOSX HTML imagemap editors is now top Google hit for “MacOSX HTML imagemap” pretty much says it all. Eventually I found (and paid for) one called YokMak that seems OK.

So the first experiment here, was to take a picture (of me) and make a simple HTML imagemap.

As a step towards treating this as re-usable metadata, here’s imagemap2svg.xslt from Max back in 2002. The results of running it with xsltproc are online: _output.svg (you need an SVG-happy browser). Firefox, Safari and Opera seem more or less happy with it (ie. they show the selected area against a pink background). This shows that imagemap data can be freed from the clutches of HTML, and repurposed. You can do similar things server-side using Apache Batik, a Java SVG toolkit. There are still a few 2002 examples floating around, showing how bits of the image can be described in RDF that includes imagemap info, and then manipulated using SVG tools driven from metadata.

Once we have this ability to pick out a region of an image (eg. photo) and tag it, it opens up a few fun directions. In the FOAF scene a few years ago, we had fun using RDF to tag image region parts with information about the things they depicted. But we didn’t really get into questions of surface-syntax, ie. how to maker rich claims about the image area directly within the HTML markup. These days, some combination of RDFa or microformats would probably be the thing to use (or perhaps GRDDL). I’ve sent mail to the RDFa group looking for help with this (see that message for various further related-work links too).

Specifically, I’d love to have some clean HTML markup that said, not just “this area of the photo is associated with the URI http://danbri.org/”, but “this area is the Person whose openid is danbri.org, … and this area depicts the thing that is the primary topic of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower”. If we had this, I think we’d have some nice tools for finding images, for explaining images to people who can’t see them, and for connecting people and social networks through codepiction.

I’ve searched around in vain for one. I want to annotate my FOAF spec diagram with mouseover text and links into the documentation. Most of the tools I find are a decade or more old, or pay-to-play. I remember the Gimp image editor can do imagemaps, but it crashes on startup on my MacBook. I did find a nice Javascript editor the other day, but it had no “undo” function, which made complex work impossible. Maybe I’ll try Amaya. Suggestions very much welcomed! Are imagemaps *that* uncool these days? They’re just SVG and image metadata in another notation… (and imho one of the the more interesting scenarios for HTML-based microformattery). That last link has missing photos and out of date SVG, but might still be of interest. A surviving screenshot included here.

Nearby: (from SWAD-Europe hacking days) an imagemap2svg.xslt thanks to Max Froumentin.

Update: I installed Amaya 9.99 for Intel MacOSX. Sadly it couldn’t even display my JPEG properly, although it did do a better job showing OmniGraffle’s SVG output than Firefox.

FOAF diagram (day 2)
Originally uploaded by danbri

Another revision, after feedback from Ivan.

The original had “Thing” in italics (a convention I tried before adding in doap: dc: and sioc: references), to indicate it was from another namespace. I’ve now made that heritage explicit (although I suspect it might confuse, the idea is pretty central so worth explaining).

Originally I had both “tipjar” and “mbox” drawn as if they were literal properties, when both are relational. The later layout I’m using allows tipjar to be drawn without crossovers, so now only “mbox” is an oddity. I’ve used italics as a hint of that, but without explicit explanation.

A lot of the redundancy in the diagram comes from the property inverses, but I want to leave them in since they’re important to explain. The expanded key in the bottom-left now has a nerdy little explanation of “inverse property”. I also use the word “subClass” explicitly on the fat arrow, to tap into an OO heritage that might be floating around in people’s minds. In other words, I want people to realise that “a Person is an Agent is a Spatial thing is a thing” is what we’re getting at with those fat little arrows.

On Ivan’s suggestion I trimmed the property lists a little. Removing the non-jabber IM properties, and first/last name. The space earned from the latter was immediately spent by adding in bio:olb since it’s useful and I’ve the impression it’s widely used.

I think that’s about it for changes. Ivan suggested removing the DOAP and SIOC partys, but to my mind they are important because those vocabularies (and projects) elaborate on parts of FOAF which are important but otherwise neglected: the description of Projects, and of Users.

OK one more version. This has coloured blogs for the core FOAF classes. I think I made a mistake choosing light blue, since that is the colour code I’ve assigned to mean “inverse functional property”, nearly. Perhaps a light yellow?

Anyway here it is for now. Guess I should stop using Flickr for this really!

Update: I’ve put the files in svn (original OmniGraffle XML is the .graffle file; also some SVG output although I’m unsure the quality), and made another slight revision, this time focussing on the layout of the ends arrows for better readability; previously they were cluttered and the property directions were therefore hard to read.

experimental foafspec diagram
Originally uploaded by danbri

I’ve been trying to capture the core terms of FOAF in a diagram. Here’s version two.

Notes: there are a few terms I’ve missed out, to avoid massive clutter: workInfoHomepage, geekcode, myersBriggs, currentProject, pastProject, dnaChecksum, membershipClass, sha1, fundedBy, theme, Online*XyzAccount, logo, phone. These are all underspecified, underused, or boring. Or all three :) The properties mbox and tipjar are the main quirks; they’re drawn like string-valued properties but are really relations. Some of the non-FOAF namespaces are done the same way too. Maybe it needs a footnote or notation for those?

I’ve included a few nods towards external namespaces; obviously these aren’t supposed to be complete.

Even this kind of diagram is a bit meta; there should be a companion diagram with instance level data using these terms. Work in progress. Suggestions and feedback would be much appreciated.

OK so I just stumbled upon this…

…via Jonathan Chetwynd’s ever-inventive and SVG-happy Peepo.com.

The “Car Bomb in Baghdad” story is from a site created by Widgit Software, and explains itself as follows:

Symbolworld has been set up to provide a web site with material suitable for symbol readers of all ages. The internet is an important medium which many people really like to use. Sadly there is very little material that is appropriate or accessible by people with learning difficulties.

The copyright statement for Symbolworld says “symbols on this page are copyright of the commercial owners. They may not be copied or used in any other format without the written permission from the owner.“, which initially struck me as a potential challenge to any use of this particular symbol-set for online communication. But I don’t really know this scene, and I guess this copyright could be just the same as the way eg. fonts are copyrighted.

So I don’t know much about this particular project/company/product, but it reminded me of some similar work I heard about a few years ago. Back when the EU, in their occasionally infinite wisdom, funded SWAD-Europe to run around talking to interesting people about standards and the Semantic Web (and giving them t-shirts) , Chaals organised a great developer workshop in Madrid on Image annotation. We had the usual fun with SVG and RDF (which btw I’m still betting on) and I got to learn a bit about CCF. Seeing the Baghdad example this morning reminded me of all this. I’ve been clicking around and trying to gather my sprawling thoughts.

CCF, the Concept Coding Framework, is kinda image annotation in reverse. Instead of focussing on the description of the content, concepts etc associated with images, the emphasis is on the use of images to illustrate some enumerated set of concepts. From Chaals’ workshop report re outcomes, I’m reminded that we discussed…

How to use Creative Commons and similar vocabularies to determine whether a particular symbol can be freely used (typically in commercial systems the symbols themselves are proprietary, which can be a major barrier to communication between people who have different systems).

CCF was using some variant of SKOS (another SWAD-Europe activity). This found its way into SKOS itself, where we now have prefSymbol and altSymbol relationships that associate a skos:Concept with a dcmitype:Image. Borrowing an illustration from the SKOS Core guide here:

The guide also notes a distinction between symbolic labelling and “depiction” in the FOAF sense; some symbols are purely symbolic, and have no representational content.

So, catching up with this area of work a little, I find the Bliss Symbolics, the WWAAC project final report, and various other accessibility-related efforts. But I’ve not really figured out where I’d start if I wanted to build something simple using a freely available symbol-set, nor what the main options/projects currently are. But there’s plenty of reading, including pages from a recent Bliss “think tank” meeting.

The latest I can find on CCF is that it has moved sites and that there are some Web interfaces available, but “sorry - there are no downloads for this project yet.”. Ah, apparently the SYMBERED project is continuing development of CCF (aside: Bliss with swedish translation; doubly incomprehensible to me!). There is a nice example on their site showing the multilingual aspect to this work, as well as contrasting Bliss with a more representationally-oriented symbol set; see their site for details.

Here’s a simple example just in English:

In case anyone thinks this whole exploration is a bit niche and obscure, take a look at how people use MSN and other IM systems sometime. And of course the Jabber/XMPP guys have been exploring specs for standard emoticons. Chaals also points out some connections to VoiceXML where “there are a handful of options available in an interaction designed to be through voice, and developers will define assorted ways of recognising from a user’s speech which of the relevant concepts is being matched.”

We’re also only a few clicks away from the survey conducted by the dreamily named W3C Emotion incubator group into use cases and technologies for the description of emotion using markup languages.

If an RDF-ized Wordnet is also thrown into the mix, assigning URIs to Synsets, WordSenses, Words, I think we might actually be getting somewhere. The version of Wordnet in RDF published at W3C doesn’t currently use SKOS, although this was discussed, and of course there are other representations that make more use of RDF class hierarchies for nouns (at the expense of linguistic lossyness and losing non-noun content). Princeton’s original English-language Wordnet has spawned many related projects and translations, but as far as I know, there is little integration amongst them, and not all of the data is public or freely re-usable.

I once had a silly dream of taking a photo to go with each and every noun term in Wordnet. A kind of SemWeb I-Spy, a cousin to Immuexa’s FOAF bingo. Or better, of doing that with friends. The rise of Flickr and tagging means that we’d probably do this now by aggregate using Flickr and similar sites. But it seems conceivable to me that such an “illustrated wordnet” could be made, using either photo-oriented or symbol-oriented illustrations.

OK what might that buy us? Let’s try these two samples.

• A car bomb has exploded in baghdad. The explosion happened in a busy marketplace.
• I want coffee and milk and cookies.

Not perfect, … but imho Wordnet gives a nice set of common and identifiable concepts that can be used as a hub for all kinds of different projects. And all we’d need is a huge pile of shared data shaped like this:

wordnet:word-cookie skos.prefLabel wikicommons:Explosion.svg .

OK it’s not going to bring about world peace and the return of esperanto, and of course there’s much more to language and communication than nouns and verbs (the easiest part of wordnet to turn into visual symbols), but it does strike me as a fun little (big) project…. Wordnet is too huge to be useful in every context where we’d want a modest-sized symbol set (eg. IM emoticons), … but it is nicely searchable, and would provide a framework for such subsets to evolve and be interconnected.