Alexandre Passant

I had a chat yesterday on Skype with Henry, wondering how FOAF-SSL applications would react on the following scenario:

• My personal URI redirects to a document about myself using a 303 redirect;
• This document is not a native RDF/XML or turtle file, but an XHTML documents embedding RDFa annotations.

Indeed, the current FOAF-SSL online certificate generation tool relies only on personal URIs (or WebID if you prefer) that corresponds to fragments of RDF documents, as in http://example.org/foaf.rdf#me. However, it shouldn't be an issue for the clients, since most recent Semantic Web applications should be able to deal with such scenarios of redirect and RDFa. And indeed, it worked perfectly - at least on the two FOAF-SSL clients that I tried with Firefox (something wrong in Safari not asking for any certificate)

It took me only a few minutes to set-up and try this complete use-case (well, actually a bit more to test it, until I discovered the Safari issue):

• Create my certificate and upload it in my browser using this tutorial;
• Generate the related RDFa snippet corresponding to the certificate, see below or in ESW Wiki;

<div about="#cert" typeof="rsa:RSAPublicKey">
  <div rel="cert:identity" href="http://apassant.net/alex"></div>
  <div rel="rsa:public_exponent">
    <div property="cert:decimal" content="65537"></div>
  </div>
  <div rel="rsa:modulus">
    <div property="cert:hex" content="8af4cb6d6ec004bd28c08d37f63301a3e63ddfb812475c679cf073c4dc7328bd20dadb9654d4fa588f155ca0
5e7ca61a6898fbace156edb650d2109ecee65e7f93a2a26b3928d3b97feeb7aa062e3767f4fadfcf169a223f4a621583a7f6fd8992f65ef1d17bc42392f
2d6831993c49187e8bdba42e5e9a018328de026813a9f"></div>
  </div>
</div>

• Add the cert and rsa namespace in my Drupal template header - even easier as I already have the other namespaces here, as well as GRDDL profile and correct DTD)
• Edit my about page (that is provided via the 303 redirection from my URI) with Drupal to add the RDFa snippet in it;
• Successfuly log-in to a test-page (that uses ARC2 - which natively supports that 303+RDFa scenarios, hence enabling that RDFa FOAF-SSL scenario) and in the Cheese lovers club; below is the output of the first one

It's now time for related applications, and I hope I'll be able to write more about it in the future.