FOAF Bulletin Board

Leigh Dodds

There's a need for a simple way to link together FOAF descriptions. One way is to simply link to other FOAF documents using the rdfs:seeAlso element. However for this to work at least one document in that graph must be being harvested by a spider, e.g. the FOAFbot. Which is not ideal.

Here's a quick and dirty proposal for how to allow the community to bootstrap itself into a network of FOAF descriptions by allowing the collaborative editing of a FOAF document index:

1. I've created a FOAFBulletinBoard page on the RDFWeb Wiki. Anyone can go to that page and add their name and a link to their FOAF description. Easy.
2. This page can then be run through the W3C HTML Tidy service to create a well-formed XHTML page. Here's a link that does that.
3. This document can then be transformed with a simple XSLT stylesheet to produce an RDF document containing a rdfs:seeAlso element for each FOAF description linked from the original page. The W3C XSLT service can do this for us.
4. The results of this transformation can then be used as an entry point for FOAF indexing engines. Here's the final URL that combines both the Tidy and XSLT transformations.

The beauty of this is that anyone can add to the list, and additional Bulletin Boards can be linked from other Wiki pages around the web.

Update: thanks to Aaron Swartz for pointing out the problems with bulletin.xsl (rdf:seeAlsos not being attached to anything, and providing a corrected stylesheet.