Defining People/Entities in APML

[Paul Jones]

Hi,

In draft 1 of the APML 1.0 specification, the element <People> is made available. Given that interests of a target may be based on the interests of a related target (someone likes the same thing as their friends), this element aims to illustrate the attention data held in a network of peers.

Given the complexity surrounding the various friends-list export formats, especially in terms of how you actually identify a user, the metadata of this element serves to be relatively tricky. My suggestion in the specification is that we don't aim to identify users - we aim to identify APML of people of interest. Some I've spoken to have not particularly liked this idea however, so I was hoping for alternate thoughts (or perhaps support...).

A late breaking possibility has also been that this element could be changed to be an <Entity> (or something better named) with an attached type attribute (eg, type="person", type="business").

Thoughts?

Paul.

[gdupont]

Hi

On Aug 8, 6:22 pm, "Paul Jones" <pauljone...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In draft 1 of the APML 1.0 specification, the element <People> is made
> available. Given that interests of a target may be based on the interests of
> a related target (someone likes the same thing as their friends), this
> element aims to illustrate the attention data held in a network of peers.
>
> Given the complexity surrounding the various friends-list export formats,
> especially in terms of how you actually identify a user, the metadata of
> this element serves to be relatively tricky.
> My suggestion in the
> specification is that we don't aim to identify users - we aim to identify
> APML of people of interest.

Same thoughts : APML should not defined things out of its scope. Focus
on what it is intended to : presenting a view on user's attention.

> Some I've spoken to have not particularly liked this idea however, so I was hoping for alternate thoughts (or perhaps
> support...).
>
> A late breaking possibility has also been that this element could be changed
> to be an <Entity> (or something better named) with an attached type
> attribute (eg, type="person", type="business").

I like the idea of "Entity" having a category/type, a name (url of
business, email of people... ) and an optionnal rdf:about attribute.

gd

PS : thanks for the 1.0 draft too

[Mason Lee]

Can someone help me understand what this "Person/Entity" element is
intended to represent?

Is it a reference to another person's attention that should affect my
attention in some way? Is it someone or something who influences my
attention? Spec 1.0 draft just says "person relevant to the target's
APML." Relevant in what way?

(If it's just a concept of a person that you pay attention to, that
would seem redundant with "Concept".)

--Mason

[scottw]

If its a person I'm attending to, then it would be a refinement of a
concept - a "concept of a person" as you describe. That would seem
somewhat redundant.

For example, if I'm interested in anything to do with Abraham Lincoln,
presumably this is the concept of Abraham Lincoln, the historical
figure.

If I'm interested in the forum posts of Mason Lee, the only real
difference is there may (or may not) be a public identifier for Mason
(e.g. an OpenID url) that could be used by an APML processor for
correlating Mason's posts on other systems. However this doesn't seem
different from any other concept URI.

S