foaf history presentation

[Dan Brickley-2]

Hi folks (FOAF list and SemWeb IG),

I gave an invited talk on monday, at a "Semantic Web perspectives"
seminar in Dagstuhl in Germany. The title is thanks to Jim Hendler,
"FOAF - the most used ontology in the history of the universe. How the
hell did that happen?".

Obviously I wouldn't propose such a grand title myself, and in fact I
added an extra "?" in the middle, but it's true that FOAF has had
massively more visibility outside the traditional ontology / knowledge
representation community than most other efforts. So I gave a talk
giving some fragmented history explaining something of what happened,
some ideas about why/how, and some notes on problems and issues.

Needless to say the slides were assembled late the night before. I
didn't attempt an explicit "credits" slide, since so many of you
contributed so much, I was fearful of missing people. For those of you I
didn't namedrop, and those that I did, many thanks for all your hacking
and enthusiasm!

Slides are here (in Flash and Keynote, sorry; I'll work out other format
exports somehow...):

http://www.slideshare.net/danbri/dagstuhl-foaf-history-talk

I'm not sure how much sense they'll make without my talk. Any
thoughts/feedback welcomed on foaf-dev or wherever.

The dynamics of how something can get so big with so few polished and
end-user-benefiting apps are interesting, to say the least. It also had
me re-visit the old mailing list archives back to mid-2000. Re-reading
the original goals and use cases,
  http://www.foaf-project.org/original-intro
...in the light of recent SemWeb developments is also a strange experience.

We have made so much progress, and yet the original use cases I mention
are not entirely addressed yet:

     * "Find me today's web page recommendations made by people who work
for Medical organisations".
     * "Find me recent publications by people I've co-authored documents
with."
     * "Show me critiques of this web page, and the home pages of the
author of that critique"
     * etc...

Looking back it is clear these scenarios were grounded in early
EU-funded work in the DESIRE project, where we had a bunch more similar
"quality labelling"-related scenarios, see
http://www.desire.org/html/research/deliverables/D3.1/

Now with POWDER, SKOS, SPARQL and RDFa in the technology enviroment, we
can do quite a lot more than back in 2004-5 when FOAF was last actively
evolving. In particular, SKOS and the Linked Data datasets I think
really fill a gap: describing a person on their own is somewhat boring;
describing them in the context of topics, places, content etc is much
more fun...

cheers,

Dan

[AzamatAbdoullaev]

"FOAF - the most used ontology in the history of the universe. How the hell
did that happen?".

With all my good sense of humor, it is carried to extremes:).

It might be a right time to announce that the Standard Ontology and
Semantics (SOS) Report is to be published on the site:
http://www.standardontology.org. There one can find a special chapter,
titled "Standard Ontology and Semantic Web: The World-Web Mapping". I
remember a raw draft was sent to TBL, but todays nobody reads or references
somebody's other works.

Additionally to the objective analysis of all key SW projects, as the formal
languages and vocabularies and datasets, there are some encouraging words on
foaf, which might be valuable to heed for prospective projects:

"There is an interesting RDF application, known as FOAF (a Friend of a
Friend), which specific vocabulary, categories, classes or types, properties
and relationships (see below), characteristic for people, are introduced
with the namespace URI 'http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/'. The project is intended
to create a machine-readable semantic ontology for homepages of agents,
persons, people,companies, organization, or groups, and how they may be
related to each other, by using human class URI's and property
(relationship)  URIs, like as foaf:know or foaf:name or foaf:
membershipclass or foaf:depiction. However interesting, many social
relationships of humans are missing, like as a relational hierarchy of
standardontology:relationship > standardontology:friendship >
standardontology:trust. Besides the key construct foaf:person is very poorly
described, which is best to be replaced with standardontology:person.

The project is viewed as a forerunner of a semantic stage in the web
development, the Giant Global Graph, or the Semantic Web, assuming that the
Web is no more about computers or documents or data, but more about real
things in the world and their complex relationships, what calls for working
out the normative ontology and semantics of world  resources."

Azamat Abdoullaev

http://semanticwww.com



----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Brickley" <danbri@...>
To: "foaf-dev Friend of a" <foaf-dev@...>
Cc: "Semantic Web" <semantic-web@...>
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 10:12 PM
Subject: foaf history presentation

>
> Hi folks (FOAF list and SemWeb IG),
>
> I gave an invited talk on monday, at a "Semantic Web perspectives" seminar
> in Dagstuhl in Germany. The title is thanks to Jim Hendler, "FOAF - the
> most used ontology in the history of the universe. How the hell did that
> happen?".
>
> Obviously I wouldn't propose such a grand title myself, and in fact I
> added an extra "?" in the middle, but it's true that FOAF has had
> massively more visibility outside the traditional ontology / knowledge
> representation community than most other efforts. So I gave a talk giving
> some fragmented history explaining something of what happened, some ideas
> about why/how, and some notes on problems and issues.
>
> Needless to say the slides were assembled late the night before. I didn't
> attempt an explicit "credits" slide, since so many of you contributed so
> much, I was fearful of missing people. For those of you I didn't namedrop,
> and those that I did, many thanks for all your hacking and enthusiasm!
>
> Slides are here (in Flash and Keynote, sorry; I'll work out other format
> exports somehow...):
>
> http://www.slideshare.net/danbri/dagstuhl-foaf-history-talk
>
> I'm not sure how much sense they'll make without my talk. Any
> thoughts/feedback welcomed on foaf-dev or wherever.
>
> The dynamics of how something can get so big with so few polished and
> end-user-benefiting apps are interesting, to say the least. It also had me
> re-visit the old mailing list archives back to mid-2000. Re-reading the
> original goals and use cases,
>  http://www.foaf-project.org/original-intro
> ...in the light of recent SemWeb developments is also a strange
> experience.
>
> We have made so much progress, and yet the original use cases I mention
> are not entirely addressed yet:
>
>     * "Find me today's web page recommendations made by people who work
> for Medical organisations".
>     * "Find me recent publications by people I've co-authored documents
> with."
>     * "Show me critiques of this web page, and the home pages of the
> author of that critique"
>     * etc...
>
> Looking back it is clear these scenarios were grounded in early EU-funded
> work in the DESIRE project, where we had a bunch more similar "quality
> labelling"-related scenarios, see
> http://www.desire.org/html/research/deliverables/D3.1/
>
> Now with POWDER, SKOS, SPARQL and RDFa in the technology enviroment, we
> can do quite a lot more than back in 2004-5 when FOAF was last actively
> evolving. In particular, SKOS and the Linked Data datasets I think really
> fill a gap: describing a person on their own is somewhat boring;
> describing them in the context of topics, places, content etc is much more
> fun...
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>