Mark Pilgrim: What could we build if we all had FOAF files?
I don’t know, but I’ll try anything once.I'm in.
Well, FOAF you too!
It would seem that there are folks out and about playing with RDF, in particular FOAF,a Friend-of-a-Friend RDF vocabulary. Mark Pilgrim's playing with it. So is Sam Ruby and Phil. Phil had some problems with the original FOAF file generated for him by the FOAF-o-matic in that it includes blank nodes -- equivalent to a subject-predicate-object (noun-property-value) that doesn't have a specified subject. He provided his own 'label' to the nodes so that they then wouldn't be blank. Usually a blank node is used when a label doesn't serve a purpose or doesn't yet exist. For instance, I might use a blank node (these used to be called anonymous nodes) to represent a "location" object. I don't really care about accessing the location, I want to access the location's parts: the city, the state, the zip code. I only use an object to group these items schematically, but I'm not interested in actually accessing the grouping directly. If I decide to have multiple locations and I do want to identify them individually, then I would add labels to the nodes for the locations and they would no longer be blank. One assumes the FOAF designers didn't see one accessing ...
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Well, FOAF you too!
It would seem that there are folks out and about playing with RDF, in particular FOAF,a Friend-of-a-Friend RDF vocabulary. Mark Pilgrim's playing with it. So is Sam Ruby and Phil. Phil had some problems with the original FOAF file generated for him by the FOAF-o-matic in that it includes blank nodes -- equivalent to a subject-predicate-object (noun-property-value) that doesn't have a specified subject. He provided his own 'label' to the nodes so that they then wouldn't be blank. Usually a blank node is used when a label doesn't serve a purpose or doesn't yet exist. For instance, I might use a blank node (these used to be called anonymous nodes) to represent a "location" object. I don't really care about accessing the location, I want to access the location's parts: the city, the state, the zip code. I only use an object to group these items schematically, but I'm not interested in actually accessing the grouping directly. If I decide to have multiple locations and I do want to identify them individually, then I would add labels to the nodes for the locations and they would no longer be blank. One assumes the FOAF designers didn't see one accessing ... [more]Trackback from Practical RDF -- The Book at