ExpertFinder 2fEFW2007 2fSlot4 5fFOAFplusplusExpertFinderFuture
From FOAF
Responsible to report: AxelPolleres
We started off to discuss general goals we want to achieve with an extended FOAF/ExpertFinder vocabulary.
A general slogan (Remark: can anyone provide the origin of it here?) could be: "I want my (meta)data back!"
If an Internet user had all her data available in a synthesized format which covers all necessary profile data to generate CVs in various formats, populate her webpage automatically, participate in social networks such as myspace, this would be incredibly useful at a personal level, avioding that all my personal profile information is hidden in various textfiles on my desktop, or within (commercial) social networking portals.
This idea is probably as old as RDF itself, but still such a synthesized format doesn't exist.
A "killer app" would allow to maintain personal/profile data in one core base and import/export in various portals or tools.
Moreover, decentralized publication of (publically accessible) parts of this metadata, would mean that Human resource portals etc. could, without the need to sign-up crawl such data on webpages, the data could be linked with personal blogs, recommendation, opening a whole lot of new possiblities for personalized web use.
We discussed the "change of fashion" for social networks (6degrees, friendster, orkut, linkedIn, myspace, openbc ...) overr time and that each of us has (next to their personal FOAF files, for sure at least 2 profiles in one of those with overlapping yet complementary information. Some have endorsement functions or other interesting features in the domain of ExpertFinder, but you gotta pay for them to make use of these features for effective search and your data is caught in the portal. Is it forbidden by usage conditions to get my data out of these by screen scrapers and get them into RDF data? As a side remark CORDIS has similar problems, also being a central portal and information about possible partners not being as easy to find as maybe possible.
In the very end of the session, we briefly touched upon how to now effectively continue with ExpertFinder/FOAF.
Danbri mentioned some technical issues, such as what the righbt namespace for extensions would be, but also PR issues came up like how we could improve the Web appearance of ExpertFinder, etc.
ACTION: All participants in that session to carve out the overall idea a bit more concretely and identify possible strategies. No concrete goals defined due to lack of time, might lead into joint project ideas.
