Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Exercise 8.3 Data portability, FOAF and the Semantic Web

How does the FOAF tag form part of the Semantic Web and Web services via social networks?
When data goes into a web interface repository, it is either manually or automatically tagged so that it is 'positioned' within the semantic web. While some may see this as an invasion of privacy, the benefit is that the more information the users offer about themselves via forms, polls, profiles etc., the more powerful will be the associations made using the FOAF idiom.
In order for the search engines to make sense of the gigabytes of free data keyed into the web each hour, they must make a call on connections and expected outcomes. If I compare my facebook page of today, I find it is infinately richer than when I created it only a few months ago. This is because the semantic web databases have processed my information stream continuously and as I make choices about which friend to accept and on which to remove, at the same time I'm telling the Semantic web a bit more about myself.
In return, the semantic web is saying 'Oh - I didn't know you cared so much about that person, issue, image,sound file, youtube clip etc. But now that I know that new information, here's a whole lot of new information/multimedia/memberships that (because of your recent choices) should be even more useful to you than last week's.'
If we 'get into the code', the metadata of the discrete webpages (and the server logs that describe our activity) we consume, reveal very accurately what sort of person we are. The FOAF tags not only broadcast our identity through syndicated sites but distill our choices into XML strings - and if we are to truly harness the power of the web - that's the way it should be. I'm not afraid of big brother.

1 comment:

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