On URL-based identifiers
Chris Messina
fiasco today over Scoble's (ab)use of Facebook, I thought this post
might light some fire under our collective arses:
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/01/03/its-high-time-we-moved-to-url-based-identifiers/
Clearly we're heading in the right direction.
Chris
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Chris Messina
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Benjamin Nowack
hmm,
[[
You’ll note that this is the same fundamental design flaw of FOAF,
the RDF format for storing contact information that preceded the
purposely distinct microformats XFN and hcard
]]
Sorry, but that's a misconception. FOAF as a pre-defined vocabulary is
in no way different from XFN or hcard. It's just a way to exchange
structured information. Privacy is fully orthogonal to the underlying
model. How and how much data you publish, *that's* where privacy has to
be considered (as you write yourself), but those considerations are
format-independent. You can dynamically generate and/or protect FOAF
output just as (non-)easily as HTML or CSV. And you can of course tie
FOAF identifiers to URLs, e.g. "rel-me" is equivalent to "foaf:homepage",
"foaf:weblog", or "foaf:openid".
Apart from that, I fully agree with your post. RDFers wouldn't say
"URLs are people", but rather something cryptic like "HTTP URIs can
be used as entry-points to resource descriptions", and would then ask
you to look at a crazy diagram like [1], but the idea is basically
the same. URL-based identity consolidation and resource description
discovery has always been a core FOAF/RDF mechanism.
Benji
[1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/diagrams/arch/follow.png
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Benjamin Nowack
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