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It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

Etiquette with friends & relationships in FOAF?

interestingly, it seems that besides myself there are a goodly number of people wondering about the etiquette surrounding foaf friend declaration. while it's mostly a social and not technical problem, it's precisely the sort of thing that will keep foaf from reaching any kind of critical mass.
Source:snowdeal.org, ex machina.

I've wondered a bit about this, too. If I've heard of you, can I list you as a friend? If I've emailed you once or twice? How about if I've dated your sister?

However, Eric Vitiello Jr. has an interesting schema for further specifying relationships in FOAF.

shortname=ooodob

Archived Comments

  • BillSeitz
    Even Advogato, poster-child for trust metrics, has fundamental user-confusion issues. http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/AdvoGato In *EarthWeb*, the reputation markets are relatively low-tech: they are driven more by strong interactions (e.g. economic transactions, even for expertise), but more importantly rely heavily on browing freetext comments, rather than simple numeric summaries. http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/EarthWebBook
  • Eric Vitiello
    This is exactly why I created the relationship schema. Unfortunately none of the applications or crawlers out there treat the schema in a manner that shows the relationships. Maybe one day!
  • Michael Bernstein
    I'd say that even before this relationship schema is deployed, FOAF crawlers can probably solve a big chunk of the social problem by ignoring (or at least heavily discounting) 'friend' declarations that are not reciprocated. This forces people to then ask each other for a pointer. Whatever people settle on as an appropriate standard will be enforced more or less automatically, as only when both individuals agree that they are 'friends' will the crawler note the relationship.
  • Dan Lyke
    SnogWeb has looked at things like the reciprocal-linking issues, and has some useful definitions for clarifying relationships.