Friend of a friend
Posted by Robert Frittmann on 9 June 2009
As part of my activities in online presence management, (which I document in my blog Cyber Presence), I have recently been registering myself on various social networks to increase my recognizability to search engines. At one such site that I registered on, a business community, I was asked as part of the registration process to undergo a personality profile test. I dutifully filled in my answers to the questions and the result came back that I am a “green” person. Now, that doesn’t mean that I am environmentally friendly, but that I am an analytical person. Here is what the profiler says about me…
You prefer to work alone and focus on facts, data and processes. You rarely (if ever) make impulsive decisions; you make rational decisions based upon evidence. You are an inventive, creative intellectual. You are good at perfecting processes and systems. You prefer a work environment that is neat and tidy. “A place for everything and everything in its place!” is your motto. You are excellent at time management and prioritising projects. However, you can also become caught up in details and sometimes lose sight of the “big picture”. Others view you cool, calculating and independent. You often wonder how other people can talk so openly about personal issues and freely offer up opinions (without substantiating their claims). You prefer hobbies that you can master alone. You tend to strive toward perfection and mastery even while relaxing. You are not overly fond of surprises and last-second changes of plans. Loud, boisterous “surprise parties” would best be thrown for other people, you would prefer a quiet evening with a good book or movie.
… yeah, I guess that just about sums me up! Those who know me personally will no doubt wonder if the person who wrote that above quote is a close friend or relative of mine.
The part about “a place for everything and everything in its place” is why I am making this personal ontology. I feel the need to document, classify, and categorize everything around me, and how it relates to me. This primal need is the reason that I came across the arcane word “ontology” in the first place. It was not even a part of my vocabulary until a few weeks ago. I wanted to document my life, like I did when I was a teenager, but this time I wanted to give a name to the process of doing this. I am doing something, but what is it that I’m doing? So I set about to find a definition of what this process is, and came upon the word “ontology”.
This word stems from “the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations.”1 This is the meaning that I was looking for when I started out to do my own personal ontology. But as I began digging, I found that the term has taken on a new connotation, as archaic words often do. In these modern times, it seems, the word “ontology” is also being used by leading-edge Internet mavens to describe the emerging ability of the web to be machine-readable. The Semantic Web, or Web 3.0 as it is sometimes called. In this understanding of the word, “ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.”2 I guess this is a close approximation of the original meaning, and why it was chosen. To pedantically define, classify, and categorize the elements or attributes of an object, and the relationships between those attributes, whether the object be a person or a document on the web.
Another interesting fact came out of my zapping around the Internet, registering myself everywhere. On several sites I was asked for my FOAF file location. I figured that this was another social network to register on, so I added it to my list of “must see” sites. When I finally got around to googling FOAF, I found that it meant “Friend of a Friend”. That sounds just like a social networking site, right? Wrong. There is no such site. It is not a website, but a project, “a decentralized technology for connecting social Web sites, and the people they describe.”3 This is the Semantic Web in action!
FOAF is about your place in the Web, and the Web’s place in our world. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online. The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.
You see, we have that phrase “machine-readable” again. It is like the difference between an old-fashioned pricing label on a can of soup, and a bar code. The problem with bar codes, is that, while they may be machine-readable, they aren’t really all that human-readable!
I will continue working on my personal ontology using a graphical mindmapping tool, but I will also be exploring this FOAF phenomenon, as it appears to have a strong tie-in to my interest in online identity and online presence issues. It seems that I have found the “missing link”, the missing piece of the puzzle that I mentioned on my main blog Frittmann Forensics, when I said… “I haven’t developed my theories on personal ontology well enough yet to link that in as well, but I know that it is related somehow.” Now I know how it is related!
1 Wikipedia: Ontology.
2 Wikipedia: Ontology (information science).
3 The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project.
