foaf

I have spent a quite unproductive, but pleasing couple of days. Christina has taken the children to Whitstable and left me to concentrate on tidying up the study and doing my project. I’m working slowly through both, but enjoying the time by myself to do whatever I want. I have set up my music studio (such that it is!), but I’m having problems with the hardware. I don’t think I’ll buy Line6 again! I managed to record some stuff last night though and it’s more promising that it was previously.

I thought about the perpetuity question raised the other day. Why does the data need to be online and stored centrally? Presumably in the future every computing device will be online and therefore anything plugged in to those devices will be online and accessible too. Each household will have it’s own web presence complete with a web server of sorts. I can imagine that each person from history will have their own FOAF rdf database (simply a text file of XML data). These can be several KB large so would be extremely portable and transferable. These foaf files would be stored on any medium and transferred as necessary. They are self-explanatory since they would uniquely identify an individual from the name and date of birth data. They can be extended to include all sorts of other data and as the Semantic Web expands I think these will become even more important.

I think this would quite elegantly solve the problem I foresee regarding perpetuity. The main problem is with the domain that the file is served from. Currently mine comes from a domain I pay for and manage – oreilly.me.uk. This could expire if I don’t renew it and therefore the link to my foaf person will disappear. However, as long as the file exists (even on a USB thumb stick!) then the important data will exist. It might be up to individual families to manage these data, similarly to how they might manage a descendant’s grave.

A better solution would be for government to host these tiny files in perpetuity. To serve a 1KB file for 70,000,000 people (about the UK’s population) would require a 70GB drive. This can be picked up for about £30 these days. It’s not a question of cost, but more of organisation. Let’s see….

See mine here: http://cliff.oreilly.me.uk/foaf_cliff.rdf.