OnlineAccountHomepageIssue

From FOAF

OnlineAccountHomepageIssue

current status: open

current owner: leigh@ldodds.com

This is a FoafVocab issue, documented as such by linking it from the IssueTracker page.

Summary: See Leigh's original mail to rdfweb-dev.

[edit] foaf:accountHomepage

Currently in FOAF we can tie a foaf:Person to a description of some account they hold on a service:

<foaf:Person>
  <foaf:holdsAccount>
    <foaf:OnlineAccount>
        <foaf:accountServiceHomepage rdf:resource="http://flickr.com"/>
        <foaf:accountName>ldodds</foaf:accountName>
    </foaf:OnlineAccount>
  </foaf:holdsAccount>
</foaf:Person>

The above describes that the person has an account, identified as "ldodds", on the service that is (indirectly) identified via an accountServiceHomepage property. Or more plainly: this person has an account "ldodds" on flickr.com.

Most services produce a custom homepage for their user, but currently there's no way to state this in FOAF, nor infer it from the currently available property.

The proposal is to add a new property: foaf:accountHomepage. This would indicate the homepage associated with a given foaf:accountName. E.g.:

<foaf:Person>
  <foaf:holdsAccount>
    <foaf:OnlineAccount>
        <foaf:accountServiceHomepage rdf:resource="http://flickr.com"/>
        <foaf:accountName>ldodds</foaf:accountName>
        <foaf:accountHomepage rdf:resource="http://flickr.com/people/ldodds/"/>
    </foaf:OnlineAccount>
  </foaf:holdsAccount>
</foaf:Person>

foaf:accountHomepage could also be safely declared as an Inverse-Functional-Property (IFP), allowing OnlineAccount resources to be safely merged together. It's not safe to make accountName an IFP as the value-space for that property is defined relative to the service its associated with.