WhatILike - Position Paper

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Description/Abstract

FoaF has been a phenomenally successful activity. Individuals around the world have generated more ontologically-powered metadata, possibly by several orders of magnitude, than any other activity or tool. FoaF is primarily fuelled by the excitement of people who are pleased to publish facts about themselves in a form that allows other people and tools to process them. FoaF publishes against a fixed ontology, to which many extensions exist that allow virtually any information about oneself to be coded. FoaF primarily enfranchises people who understand what is happening; this is because the tools to build FoaF descriptions are generally rather limited. The utilities that use the FoaF descriptions are restricted because they can only use FoaF data. It is interesting to explore what might be considered a next step. How might we allow a more fluid ontological framework? How would we enfranchise people who understand less about what is happening, against a more fluid ontological framework? How do we simply encourage people to produce even more metadata?