tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1303975371294158246.post1349075615660288706..comments2024-03-11T10:02:17.638+00:00Comments on Digital Curation Blog: Linked data and staff contact pagesGraham Pryorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12394604548989689232noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1303975371294158246.post-42863980388274075602010-01-23T11:08:49.188+00:002010-01-23T11:08:49.188+00:00I think a few issues are raised here:
1/. The iss...I think a few issues are raised here:<br /><br />1/. The issue of a standard format *for the Web* for publishing individual contact 'record' that can be ingested into a client-side 'phone book' application. Is RDF a good choice, if the commonly used clients do not support it? But then again, perhaps this is just the usual chicken and egg problem for standards adoption.<br /><br />2/. The issue of an organisation not being very well joined up in the sense of establishing an 'authoritative' contact record and reusing throughout the organisation. This kind of join-up is some sort of a goal for HEIs and has been for years. There are other, arguably simpler technical approaches to this, but the problem would seem to not be technical so much as simply one of organisational management.<br /><br />3/. The question of whether or not it is useful for an organisation like UKOLN to publish its contact details in RDF (specifically FOAF) such that other organisations might make use of this in a semi-automated way. It has been some years since I created and published a FOAF file for myself - I can't even remember where iI put it now - it's likely not online any more. It was never actually used for anything useful. However, there is clearly a renewed appetite for RDF currently, so perhaps the tooling and support will finally arrive.<br /><br />Which brings me the the positive part of my comment (every comment should offer something!):<br /><br />Chris, if you would like the DCC to be able to expose UKOLN contact details on its Website by directly accessing RDF in the way you describe, then in the interests of experimentation I will commit UKOLN to providing RDFa embedded in its contact pages - most likely using FOAF to describe the information.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1303975371294158246.post-64062659976115921342010-01-21T18:01:32.061+00:002010-01-21T18:01:32.061+00:00I realised there was another implication. Thinking...I realised there was another implication. Thinking back to my Glasgow days, they put a lot of effort into creating an authoritative staff list, which linked to the HR system. If your data on that staff list were wrong, then your HR data were also wrong; something that it was probably important to fix. The problem is that many departments ran their own staff lists, which rapidly became un-synchronised. If the departmental staff lists used Linked Data from theUniversity staff list, they would always be synchronised. And if the only way to fix data that looked wrong was to fix the HR data, then that too would be more accurate.<br /><br />In this case, I note that Paul's University staff list entry differs from his UKOLN entry (relatively trivial; the University not yet reflecting his recent new appointment). But it would be a case where the Linked Data would just work. Similarly the DCC contacts page would use Linked data from the UKOLN contacts page, and also be up to date...Chris Rusbridgehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07426316331703324594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1303975371294158246.post-41455941632644136002010-01-21T17:50:28.776+00:002010-01-21T17:50:28.776+00:00Hi chris. You might take a look at what Google hav...Hi chris. You might take a look at what Google have been up to, see the Social Graph API at http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/ (with intro video); this is used behind the scenes in some other apps, eg. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-social-search-i.html<br /><br />(that app consumes only the rdf/xml variant)<br /><br />For an RDFa-based app, see Yahoo SearchMonkey, http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/smguide/profile_vocab.html <br /><br />And yes, it would be nice if both worked with both syntaxes...Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14210831126764178306noreply@blogger.com