Costello, Roger L. wrote: > But Alice is friends with Bob is useful. > ^ ^ ^ > | | | > source relationship target
I think that maybe Alice and Bob are plotting something. They keep sending all these encrypted e-mails to each other. Eve and I will get to the bottom of it eventually. Yes, with explicitly included hCards (or another way of specifying information about the people), XFN becomes a *lot* more useful, but I think there is probably still some minimal value in XFN even without this. (As others have pointed out, especially with rel="me".) For many purposes, it would certainly be useful to have a documented method for converting the "physical" XFN model of: [url1] friend [url2] to the "logical" XFN model of: [person1] friend [person2] However, I don't think requiring each URL to carry an hCard is necessarily the best way of doing that. It would certainly work, but it's a very blunt tool because: 1. The owners of url1 and url2 might not want to provide contact information. 2. url1 or url2 might be a non-HTML resource (e.g. PDFs, images, "mailto:" URLs, etc. The solution I've been working on is that when an XFN relationship is found taking the form "[url1] friend [url2]", assume that it really means: [ Person: represented-by = url1 ] friend [ Person: represented-by = url2 ] Then use a whole variety of methods to learn as much as possible about the person represented by each URL. This might include looking for hCards on both pages, analysing FOAF files linked to from either, RDFa, etc. One particularly useful technique is to look for an hCard such that the "uid" property is url1, and look for another with a "uid" property of url2. After all this analysis, we may end up with a relationship like this: [ Person: name = Alice title = Webmistress org = Webby Inc blog = url1 represented-by = url1 ] friend [ Person: represented-by = url2 ] This shouldn't be seen as a failure -- just (perhaps) as less information than we wanted. Maybe in the future we'll be able to fill in Alice's phone number, or person2's name and e-mail address. Maybe we won't. -- Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS [Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux] [OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 1 day, 17:06.] The Semantic Web http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/03/09/sw/ _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss