BluetoothBeacon

From FOAF

a quick brain dump --danbri

When we exchange descriptions of things in the Web, it helps to be clear about what things we're describing.

This isn't always easy. Consider a mobile phone application for mixed-media description of things such as restaurants. While restaurants can be (indirectly) referenced through citing pairs of a property (such as 'homepage', 'telephone number', etc) and a value (the address of their homepage, or tel: no...), this doesn't help a mobile phone software application figure out where it is. Even if a phone had GPS-based location info (latititude, longitude), getting from those isn't so easy.

BluetoothBeacon is a (draft of a draft of a) convention for overloading Bluetooth discoverable devices by allowing one of them to serve as a 'beacon'. A bt-beacon device can be prompted (how? addressbook vcard exchange?) into emitting a self-description that says, in effect, "I'm the bluetooth beacon for the 'Restaurant' [or other entity] whose 'homepage' (or other property) is '....' (some specific value).

Example scenario:

So, someone sits in a resaurant with a fancy new phone. They select 'describe this' and pick 'restaurant' from a menu. The device scans for bluetooth devices, notes 3 that have BTBEACON in their name, and probes them for info (@@how? ask Edd :) eventually extracting short RDF/XML descriptions. Something like:

<BTBeacon btb:idstring="dansdiner-BTBEACON">
  <advertises>
   <wn:Restaurant>
     <foaf:homepage>
       <foaf:Document rdf:about="http://danbridiner.example.com/">
         <foaf:tel rdf:resource="tel://0123.321.312"/>
         <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:diner@danbri.org"/>
          <foaf:logo  rdf:resource="http://etc.example.org/dd.jpg"/>
       </foaf:Document>
     </foaf:homepage>
   </wn:Restaurant>
  </advertises>
 </BTBeacon>

The user gets to confirm that, yes, their intent is to public a note describing this thing (the Restaurant whose homepage is ... / logo is ... etc). They write a review article. Similar markup (minus the BTBeacon and advertises bit) is used in the published article (rss1, or some atom-as-rdf thing?) to indicate that the article was about the specified thing.

Happyness ensues.