Apologies for the title, I’m just sort of tapped out right now. Bonus points if you caught the reference.

So I’m down to about one month until the Ruby Conference and I really need to get to work on my presentation. I already know most of what I want to say in terms of background information, but I’d like to cook up some simple application in order to demonstrate the various Ruby libraries for RDF processing. By developing the same application in each of the available libraries I should get a pretty good feel for which one(s) are most mature and can be recommended for other people to check out.

One obvious choice is a “six degrees of Lyle” application, that would make use of the various “knows” entries in my FOAF file to spider out and identify all of the people who are n degrees away from me. I haven’t tried this yet, but I have the feeling that given the somewhat inbred nature of the fledgling FOAF community I might not have much luck for values of n greater than one. Unless I make some farfetched claim, such as that I “know” Dan Brickley or some other well-connected soul. It also suggests that I have the time and bandwidth to run a scutter.

A more straightforward but less glamorous application would be a little utility that reads a FOAF file containing mbox entries for various people and converts them into mboxsha1sum entries. That is, I could maintain my FOAF using the unencrypted e-mail addresses for my friends by use this utility to encrypt them before publishing my FOAF to the web. It would certainly be a useful tool for me to have, since I’m currently just leaving little comments to myself in the FOAF to remind me of which e-mail address a particular mboxsha1sum tag refers to, e.g. “This is Bob’s yahoo.com e-mail address”.

I’ve also got a nagging feeling that I could do some interesting things with the Auburn Knights Alumni Association’s database if I were to convert it to RDF. Charlie K. has already asked me to take the lead in organizing and writing up the history of the band in the 90′s and so I’m having to sift through all of this data anyways, to try to identify who was on the band when. In order to pound it with the RDF hammer I’d need to cook up an appropriate vocabulary, or even better a combination of existing vocabularies. FOAF could certainly be a part of that, and maybe Masahide Kanzaki’s Music Vocabulary (although the latter seems more slanted toward classical music performances and musicians, and not Big Band Jazz).