The Sun BabelFish Blog

Sun Intranet Foaf Experiment

Building a foaf server from an ldap directory is pretty easy. Rinaldo Di Giorgio put a prototype server together for Sun in less than a week. As a result everyone in Sun now has a experimental temporary foaf id, that we can use to try out some things.

So what can one do with foaf that one could not so easily do with ldap? Well the semantic web is all about linking and meshing information. So one really simple thing to do is to link an external foaf file with the internal one. I did this by adding an owl:sameAs statement to my public foaf file that links my public and my sun id. (It would be better to link the internal foaf file to the external one, but that would have required a bit more work internally). As a result by dragging and dropping my foaf file onto today's release of the AddressBook someone who is inside the Sun firewall, can follow both my internal and my external connections. Someone outside the firewall will not be able to follow the internal link.

By extending the internal foaf server a little more one could easily give people inside of Sun a place to link to their external business connection, wherever they might be in the world. To allow other companies to do this too it would of course help if everyone in Sun had a minimally public foaf ID, which would return only minimal information, or whatever the employee was comfortable revealing about themselves. This would allow Sun to present a yet more human face to the world.

Well that's just a thought, and this is just an experiment. Hopefully it will make the semantic web more real for us here, and allow people's to dream up some great way of bringing all the open source world together, ever closer.

PS. For people inside of Sun it may be easier to just drag my internal foaf file directly on the the AddressBook (started via jnlp). Otherwise to get the internal foaf file to download you need to click the "fetch" button next to the "same As" combo box when viewing my info. Then you need to switch to "Last Imported" and back to allow "Bernard Traversat" to appear in the second column. He appears as someone I foaf:know after the merger of the internal and the external foaf. I know this is clumsy, and I'll try thinking up a way to make this more user friendly very soon. You are welcome to participate on the Address Book Project.

PPS. Sun internal users can get more info on the project home page.

PPPS. We of course use the Firefox Tabulator plugin too for tests. It gives a different interface to my AddressBook. It is more flexible, but less specialised... The Tabulator web application does not work currently because we only produce Turtle output. This is to avoid developers trying to use DOM tools to process these pages, as we don't want to put work into an RDF crystalisation. ( Note: If at some later time you find that the plugin is not compatible with the latest version of Firefox, you can manually disabling compatibility checks. )

Posted at 03:23PM Aug 26, 2008 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb  |  Comments[1]