I hate crashes in the middle of blog posts. But anyway..

JabRSS has been playing up all today, so I only got the news via the old-school method of visiting Danny’s site, but Peter Saint-Andre (aka King of Jabber) has posted on the rdfweb-dev mailing list that they’re thinking about using FOAF to identify Jabber entities. Currently Jabber uses vCard to identify users, and a hacked vCard-temp namespace to identify Jabber Components (IIRC); the use of FOAF would be a great, great move. These are currently the two technologies I’m most interested in, so perhaps I’m biased, but I can’t see of anything but good coming from this.

On a more downbeat note, I can’t quite get my head around what the simplest way of linking a Jabber account with a pre-exisiting FOAF file could be, except for some kind of smushing based on the jabberID property.

Interestingly, Peter points out that It [FOAF] defines data elements for things like projectHomepage and geek code, but not for things like marital status or sex. This hadn’t even occured to me before. The file says who I am, who I know, where I went to school and what my interests are, but not if I’m a boy or a girl. Is this an oversight, or defined elsewhere? I’ve not seen it in the relationship vocab or biographical vocab, which seemed the only likely candidates.