This is a list of observations gathered from the reports for Assignment 1. An underlying question was: "What is the point of RDF?" (1) Linking different sources of information. FOAF has FOAF information; WWW photos have photographs of some of the people in FOAF; AktivePhoto has information about the WWW session. The underlying point is to be able to connect these together (in the same presentation). (2) No longer create "collections of web pages", but create information repositories which can be presented to the user. ("Databases++".) FOAF ---- Comparison unfair since it was not designed to have a good interface. Definition behind "friend" unclear. Include concrete information about what you can do with the web site. Set up for technical user group. Redundant information is annoying. Other "friend" applications already exist, such as Friendster http://www.friendster.com/ and ICQ http://www.icq.com/ Issues to consider are forgery, verification, privacy. For privacy can consider "public", "protected" and "private" information. There is no way to remove unauthorised entries from pLink. Need to separate author and viewer roles. (For assignment 3 concentrate on viewer roles.) It is not clear what kind of page is opened when you follow a link. A good example is the TOMOB concept from Japan which is making FOAF available with Flash. Another example is FOAFnaut is an example of using SVG with FOAF. FOAFnaut is promising because of its graphical emphasis. http://www.foafnaut.org/ An analog application, Grokker, which focuses on visualization of data from search result might be interesting to compare. http://www.grokker.com/ Desired information: address, phone number, e-mail address, a picture, the main interests of the person, whether he/she is studying or working and what kind of study or work, where is he/she living, date of birth, web page (URL), education, family, hobby, religion. Example question: Is there a saxophone teacher in the neighbourhood of Eindhoven? (What is a neighbourhood? What is Eindhoven?) Extend FOAF RDF schema with connection to suitable "biography" RDF schema(s). (to allow for searching for people working in a common field of interest). Person's name is at the very top of the page, while the nickname is the last entry. "seeAlso" links, instead of the bottom part of the page or a sidebar, occupy the most prominent place. Some fields seem to serve only as placeholders for information. These should be displayed only when conveying information useful to visitors. White space is good, but there is too much. Introduce categorisation of "knows" list: shares room with, spouse of, boss of, co-author with... Assign a clear label to each link and if necessary add a short description. Privacy issues of adding information about someone else. Different language versions. What does "Where am I now?" mean? How would you order long lists of friends? If there are 10? 100? 1000? PLINK ----- What is the difference between "I know:" and "I'm known by:"? Allow search in some way other than name (we have the FOAF RDF - use it!). What should I do with the information that shows the sites where the FoaF file of a person is mentioned? Not always possible to see whole page at once. When link from person 1 to person 2 you can't see where you came from (have to use the back button). Where are you? (What does "where are you" mean in an information space with no beginning?) Use hyperbolic browser for exploring graph? What does this give you? What doesn't this give you? Show pictures of the people he/she knows and by whom he/she is known instead of only (as well as?) a link. Allow personalization of the (layout? information content?) page. How could you do that? WWW photos ---------- How should the photos be organised? Need to include a search facility. Can't add description of complete image. Add slideshow feature (so can sit back and watch). What is the RDF for? (The RDF descriptions under the individual descriptions.) Allow the user to see the "who knows who" information. Make extension of FOAF vocabulary includes audio resource (of speaker, for example). How can I jump to another photo instead of looking up photo one by one in a photo sequence? AktivePhotos ------------ When I have found a person at a session, then show me the photo of them. Example Questions: I want to see all the sessions about the semantic web. I would like to make my own agenda of the conference with this page, so I can check whether the sessions that I want to follow overlap. Purpose of "direct link" completely unclear. Noadster -------- "Noadster? No way!" As it stands - totally useless! (My (Lynda) feeling is that it is better than nothing - most observations are that nothing would have been better...) How can you choose which information to show to the user? Does a designer (the one constructing the RDF? The one constructing the "web site"?) select this? Does the user select this? From a list of "meaningless" URI's?