Alexandre Passant

Monday's DBpedia mobile presentation at LDOW2008 impressed me a lot. Actually, while I never worked on it, I'm really interested in ways to combine mobile applications, Semantic Web / Linked Data technologies and social networking. Here's a use case I have in mind for a long time and I'd like to share.

Imagine in can embed a FOAF profile on my mobile phone, or just an URI with owl:sameAs / rdfs:seeAlso links to my main URI / RDF file. When joining a conference, a restaurant or any place where there are some people (and when I'm in a good mood), I allow my phone to deliver my presence and this URI (+ related data) to anyone, while at the same time searching for available URIs and data.

Then, I got a list of URIs, and my phone will suggest me that there's some people nearby that I must meet regarding some criterias and how our URIs are interlinked. A simple way would be to configure the application with kind of (statement, depth) tuples. For example (foaf:interest, 2) would suggest me all people where one of my foaf:interest is link to one of their foaf:interest with a maximum path of 2. And of course, those paths should be computed using Linked Data and considering the whole SW graph, or GGG, e.g. going through DBpedia, GeoNames of any dataset from the LOD cloud if needed.

But, in some case, paths are not enough, as they can result to unrelevant results (depending on the start URI the path may quickly go towards too generic URIs), or sometimes too much people. For example, at a SW event, I guess it would have suggest me to meet anything since I have dbpedia:Semantic_Web in my profile. A solution could be to have an intelligent context manager in the mobile phone that will check my iCal, find that I'm attending a workshop (or even better, use GPS location, browse upcoming.org or other services to find which event I'm attending), retrieve the workshop homepage in which organizers embedded some RDF data about topics of the workshops (as they eat their own dogfood :), and exclude those URIs (and paths that goes through). To be more accurate, instead of those path tuples, I could also define complex queries, as for example: "People that will present some paper at a conference I'll attend next month".
Actually, it's just a matter of providing all the data, open it, and of course, interlink. But well, "Linked Data is the Semantic Web done as it should be. It is the Web done as it should be", no ?