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:

• Support for Relationship vocabulary (that I introduced in PHOAF recently). So if you use rel:xxx instead of foaf:knows to manage your friends, the tool will find them anyway;
• Group management. As I explained here, PHOAF can handle foaf:group, and this feature have been integrated into FOAFMap, so that you can use it to display communities. Thanx Tom for suggesting it;
• Cache. As you may see, it can be really long to parse a file, especially when there are a lot of foaf:knows relations. A cache system is now available, so that you can save the created map to display it more quickly later. Just check the appropriate checkbox when submitting your profile to enable. You’ll also be listed in users directory when using cache system.
• Tags. FOAFMap.net automagically gets “Tags” from your FOAF profile. Actually, these tags are your foaf:interest. Tags are identified and mapped thanks to their URI, as people can use different labels (with dc:title) for the same one; eg: FOAF, ”Friend of a Friend’ for http://foaf-project.org. And, indeed, you can see which profiles are related to a specific tag.

Well, as you can see, what was at the begining just a small script to render FOAF files on a GoogleMap is now an more complex (and friendly, I hope) tool that takes ideas from both Semantic Web and Web2.0.

I think this could be a Semantic Web answer to geolocation tools such as frappr.com. The main advantage is that you own the data, and the tool just display it. If your blogging software, or wiki, creates a personnal/group FOAF file, you can use the tool to locate people, but data is still yours.

Some may insist on the privacy point, as there’s no logging system. Yet, as all data displayed on the tool is publicly available on the web, I don’t think that’s an issue. Anyway, you can drop me a mail if someone else has listed your profile and you want to remove it.

Finally, I’ll submit FOAFMap.net to SFSW06 scripting challenge, and will certainly release code (GPL-ed), so that you can use for Intranet or private working groups.

Have fun !

TechCrunch en français

TechCrunch, l’un des blogs de référence sur les outils du “Web 2.0” est disponible en français depuis quelques semaines, et c’est par ici. En plus de traduire les articles du site original, cette version devrait proposer ses propres billets.

A bookmarker !

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 for FoafResource, so that you can check if your PPD is a Person, a Group, 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 ISWC2005: Piggy Bank

David Huynh vient de présenter Piggy Bank à travers un exemple de collecte et de partage d’informations depuis différentes sources (logements et restaurants).

Comme expliqué dans un précédent billet, l’objectif de Piggy Bank est de proposer la collecte, la combinaison et la visualisation contextuelle d’informations en provenance de n’importe quel(s) site(s) web, qu’il s’agisse d’informations publiées dès la source en RDF (RSS, FOAF …) ou extraites vers du RDF depuis ces sites (XSLT, scrapper Javascript avec Solvent …).

Une killer app, puisque l’intêret ici est d’exploiter ces informations depuis des sites en “HTML pur” en l’attente de sites sémantiques au sens WS.

Flock (ou pas) ?

J’ai testé brièvement Flock, le nouveau "navigateur social" basé sur Mozilla.

Un des ses atouts est l’intégration dans l’interface de différents services comme Flickr, del.ico.us (pour le moment) et certains outils de blogs. En gros, ce qui se fait déjà avec les bookmarklets, mais cette fois en utilisant directement son navigateur. Rien de vraiment nouveau, surtout que j’ai tendance à préférer les bookmarklets, par exemple pour ajouter des métadonnées à mes billets Dotclear. L’agrégateur RSS est également assez semblable à celui de Safari.

Bon, ceci dit, il y a quand meme quelques trucs sympas, comme le formulaire de recherche contextuel qui affiche les favoris et l’historique correspondante avec un aspect Spotlight, et la possibilité de tagger les bookmarks même en local.

Bref, ça n’est qu’une Beta, mais pas de quoi me faire décrocher de Firefox pour l’instant (d’autant plus que certaines extensions ne passent pas, notamment Greasemonkey)

• About

  This is the personal website of Alexandre Passant, PhD student in the Semantic Web and Social Software area.

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