Category Archives: FOAF

Twitter Iran RT chaos

From Twitter in the last few minutes, a chaos of echo’d posts about army moves. Just a few excerpts here by copy/paste, mostly without the all-important timestamps. Without tools to trace reports to their source, to claims about their source from credible intermediaries, or evidence, this isn’t directly useful. Even grassroots journalists needs evidence. I [...]

Also posted in Activism, Conspiracy Theory, Politics, Project ideas, SKOS, The Web at War, ggg, openid, privacy | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Site recovery

Busy sysadmin week. The main FOAF site is back, now hosted on Amazon EC2. Thanks to Stephane Corlosquet for all the time he spent fixing up the Drupal installation, after the recent server compromise. I’ve also moved over danbri.org (well, DNS is propagating), and migrated my blog into a completely fresh Wordpress installation. The FOAF namespace [...]

Also posted in coding, openid, privacy | Leave a comment

The House that Jack Built

<Farmer> <sowed> <Corn> <kept> <Cock> <woke> <Priest> <married> <Man> <kissed> <Maiden> <milked> <Cow> <tossed> <Dog> <worried> <Cat> <killed> <Rat> <ate> <Malt> <in> <House> <builtBy> <Person foaf:name=”Jack” /> </builtBy> </House> </in> </Malt> </ate> </Rat> </killed> </Cat> </worried> </Dog> </tossed> </Cow> </milked> </Maiden> </kissed> </Man> </married> </Priest> </woke> </Cock> </kept> </Corn> </sowed> </Farmer>
FOAF super-connectivity daydreams from 2002.
“indirectly [...]

Also posted in Activism, Politics, Project ideas, Technology, ggg | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

State of the (OAuth) Union from Eran Hammer-Lahav

A must-read for those who care about standardised access to non-public Web data.

Also posted in SocialWeb, Technology, ggg, oauth, privacy | Leave a comment

On the internet, no-one knows.

“Because most of the targeted employees were male between the ages of 20 and 40 we decided that it would be best to become a very attractive 28 year old female. We found a fitting photograph by searching google images and used that photograph for our fake Facebook profile. We also populated the profile with [...]

Also posted in Project ideas, SocialWeb, ggg, privacy, quotes | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Skosdex progress: basic lucene search

I now have a crude Lucene index derrived from SKOS data. It is more or less a toy example, but somehow promising also.
Example below is a test against FAO’s AGROVOC. Each concept becomes a “document”, with a “word” field containing the prefLabel, and a “uri” field for the concept URI. I don’t index anything else [...]

Also posted in SKOS, Semantic Web, Technology, coding, foaf4lib, ggg | Leave a comment

Facebook problem statement

People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to [...]

Also posted in Project ideas, SocialWeb, ggg, oauth, openid, privacy | Leave a comment

Skosdex: SKOS utilities via jruby

I just announced this on the public-esw-thes and public-rdf-ruby lists. I started to make a Ruby API for SKOS.
Example code snippet from the readme.txt (see that link for the corresponding output):

require “src/jena_skos”
s1 = SKOS.new(”http://norman.walsh.name/knows/taxonomy”)
s1.read(”http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/author/mortenf/skos.rdf” )
s1.read(”file:samples/archives.rdf”)
s1.concepts.each_pair do |url,c|
puts “SKOS: #{url} label: #{c.prefLabel}”
end

c1 = s1.concepts["http://www.ukat.org.uk/thesaurus/concept/1366"] # Agronomy
puts “test concept is “+ c1 + ” ” [...]

Also posted in Project ideas, SKOS, SPARQL, Semantic Web, Technology, coding, foaf4lib, ggg, ruby, swig | Leave a comment

Family trees, Gedcom::FOAF in CPAN, and provenance

Every wondered who the mother(s) of Adam and Eve’s grand-children were? Me too. But don’t expect SPARQL or the Semantic Web to answer that one! Meanwhile, …

You might nevetheless care to try the Gedcom::FOAF CPAN module from Brian Cassidy. It can read Gedcom, a popular ‘family history’ file format, and turn it into RDF (using [...]

Also posted in Essays, History, Politics, Semantic Web, Technology, foaf4lib, ggg | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments