"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Brian Kelly and Leigh Dodds (ingenta) co-authored a paper on Using FOAF To Support Community-Building which was presented at the IADIS Web-Based Communities 2004 conference held in Lisbon on 24-26^th March 2004.

Materials

This paper was subsequently republished in the Upgrade journal. The paper is available on the University of Bath institutional repository.

Using FOAF To Support Community-Building

[PDF] - [MS Word]

In addition the slides are also available.

Slides

Slides: [MS PowerPoint format] - [HTML format]

FOAF Authoring Tools

FOAF-a-matic Mark 2

Images of FOAFaMaticMark2 Authoring Tool

Screen dump 1: Personal information screen

Screen dump 2: Professional information screen

Screen dump 3: Friends information screen

Screen dump 4: IWM information screen

Screen dump 5: Conferences information screen

Proposal

Paper Details

Category

Short Paper

Track

A3 - Visionary Web Architectures

Title

Using FOAF To Support Community-Building

Authors' names, complete affiliations, addresses

Mr Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath BATH UK BA2 7AY

Mr Leigh Dodds ingenta Lower Bristol Road BATH UK BA2 3DZ

Name of author to be contacted for correspondence

Brian Kelly

E-mail address and fax of contact author

Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
FAX: +44 1225 386838

Paper abstract

The Semantic Web seeks to enable a global distributed database of information through the development of an infrastructure that facilitates integration of data from independent communities without the requirement for prior agreement on the structure of this data. This basic concept seems to be of particular relevance to the development of online communities in which we are currently seeing a wide range of collaborative tools being used in a number of different ways. Although many of these tools will be beneficial to their communities, there is a danger that the resources developed within a community will not be accessible to others, thereby limiting the opportunities for knowledge sharing. This paper outlines the potential for Semantic Web technologies to ensure that resources can be defined in a way that promotes their ability for being shared with third-parties with a minimum of integration effort.
The paper outlines one particular Semantic Web application - FOAF (Friend Of A Friend). The paper reviews this application and describes its potential for community-building amongst conference delegates.

A maximum of three keywords which best describe the work

FOAF, Semantic Web, community-building

Appropriate references

Brian has spoken at a number of international conferences, including co-authoring a short paper at the IADIS Internet/WWW 2003 conference on "Deployment Of Quality Assurance Procedures For Digital Library Programmes", presenting a paper on "Approaches To The Preservation Of Web Sites" at the Online Information 2002 conference in December 2002, and one on "Automated Benchmarking Of Local Government Web Sites" at the EuroWeb 2001 conference held in Italy in December 2001. He gave a presentation on "HTML Is Dead! A Web Standards Update" and took part in a panel session on "Isn't Web Site Accessibility Too Difficult To Implement?" at the Internet Librarian International 2003 conference in March 2003. Brian is a regular columnist for the Ariadne e-journal.

A brief CV of author

Brian Kelly provides the UK Web Focus post, a JISC-funded post which provides advice and support to the UK Higher and Further Education Communities in the area of the Web. Brian is also the project manager for the QA Focus project.
Brian has been involved in Web activities since 1993, when he was involved in setting up one of the first Web sites in the UK Higher Education community. He has been involved in Web activities since then, and has participated in several of the International World Wide Web Conferences, as a member of the program committee, author of several short papers and conference delegate.
Brian is based in UKOLN - a national centre of excellence in digital information management, based at the University of Bath.