Biogang:Projects/FOAF scientific network

This is a draft, need to write this down before going to bed :-)  --Lindenb 22:29, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

The Idea
Creating a decentralized scientific social network.

Concept
Everyone who wants creates a FOAF profile. Each person stores is FOAF on his own server (e.g. or on google-docs/spreadsheet, sharing as text an URL : e.g. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ppNhVlOcgerMrxoPSUPqkHg&output=txt&gid=0 (again here it's a draft created from a random list of paper))

This FOAF/RDF profile contains
 * a list of publications
 * the geoloc
 * the foaf:knows linked to the person he/she knows
 * interest

the document should be semi-structured, that is to say, it is a well-defined RDF+XML document but the tags will be ordered in a defined format. Why ? because RDF can be messy an requires an sophisticated API such as JENA. On the other hand, if the elements are ordered we can use Stax/SAX/DOM to parse the document or create a XST stylesheet.

Specification
Here is described the content of a FOAF file.

Now

 * need a xslt to transform pubmed/XML 2 FOAF/RDF

An then...

 * simple tool: create a graphiz-dot diagram of the network
 * search a person by geoloc/interest/publication and return a list orderer by degrees of separation.
 * graphic interface