PHOAF v0.3 and foafMap future
I’ve updated PHOAF in CVS last week-end, and also as a v0.3 release.
Here’s the changelog:
- First, a bugfix about PHP5 warnings in RAP, as it uses reference when calling some methods. I fixed it in v0.1 but forgot to do it when upgrading RAP to 0.9.3[1]. Thanx to Jean-Jacques for reporting it
- Removing all useless code from RAP, so that the API will be lighter to embed in other apps. By useless, I mean that PHOAF doesn’t need all the features that RAP offers, as infModel, resModel … I also removed the SPARQL + RDQL functions. Indeed, the aim of PHOAF is to provide an easy way to parse FOAF files, using only PHP objects and appropriate methods. IMHO, if a user want to use SPARQL on FOAF files, it means that he knows RDF and SPARQL, so he’ll have better to use RAP directly instead of PHOAF. The archive is now only 91K, while it used to be 544k for v0.2 !
- the methode FoafModel->root(), which is used when you want to get the primary topic of the file can now retrieve not only people, but also groups[2]
- As a consequence of the previous point, I added a
getResourceType()method forFoafResource, so that you can check if your PPD is aPerson, aGroup, or anything else actually.
So, indeed, I’ll move it into foafmap soon.
The main interest is that it will be able to manage group files, as Tom suggested me. Then, I’ll put an optional cache system (as retrieving informations from distributed FOAF files over the network is a bit long). I’ll also add a user account system, so that users will be available to update their cached result, maybe tag their profile (with tag detection from foaf:interests), etc …
I think it could lead to a SemWeb equivalent to Frappr!, where the main advantage is that you own your datas, and the app is just here to display it on a map. I think that’s really better, for privacy and for decentralized knowledge management. If you or one of your friend change location, you won’t have to modify anything, just update your FOAF profile, reload your foafmap page, and that’s ok !
Notes
[1] RAP v1.0 might be rewritten in PHP5
[2] BTW, please use personalProfileDocument and primaryTopic when you create a FOAF file. That’s the better machine-readable way to tell who is your FOAF file about
Tags: foaf, foafmap, geolocalisation, phoaf, rdf, socialsoftware
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Current highlights
FOAFMap.net is online !
As I’m finally satisfied with the code I wrote, here’s a first public version of FOAFMap.net, a “not-beta Semantic Web2.0 geolocation mashup” (nice, isn’t it ?!). Regarding the previous version of the tool, here are the main improvements: