Comments on: Tantek Çelik’s True Identity Revealed!

By: Dan Brickley

Dan Brickley — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:07:45 +0000

FWIW FOAF aggregators run into very similar problems. In FOAF we uniquely identify people through any of several properties that are marked ‘inverse functional’ in the schema, eg. homepage, personal mailbox, weblog, etc. Inevitably these are sometimes published incorrectly, screwing up data merging. Pretty much inevitable, but I hope better validators / checking tools, and in general having more code that does stuff with the data, will help to keep things reasonably tidy.

By: Ofer Egozi

Ofer Egozi — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:44:00 +0000

I see it now, excellent spotting, I narrowed it down to a real page in TCUK and updated the post. Thanks! I agree that XFN has its shortcomings but most of the mistakes I see come from those darn humans, who misinterpret what it means, not the machines. The answer to this is to provide them in a context where they immediately become useful, thus mistakes will immediately harm your experience, so you go and fix it. As for API, well we're not there yet, still so much to process before we can offer something useful, but it will come. In the meantime, SGAPI is a fantastic resource, perhaps you want to share where it doesn't answer your need and perhaps I can offer an idea.

By: Hadar Weiss

Hadar Weiss — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:53:04 +0000

The query was simply “techcrunch”
There are probably more examples…
IMHO XFN is too sensitive and error prone.
The more it will be specified by humans (and not
machines), the more we’ll get such mistakes.

Also, the slideshow looks interesting, and I read Karmona’s post about the SG challenges…
Thanks for the info.
I wonder, except from these great tips, do you (Delver) have an API for developers? Help us overcome the mighty graph

Thanks,
Hadar

By: Ofer Egozi

Ofer Egozi — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:01:54 +0000

Hi Hadar, thanks.
Indeed not simple at all. Have a look here for more such potential horrors. What you mention on techcrunch happens when people mistakenly use rel=”me” for general links in their blogroll (for example wordpress or google), but what query did you use? I don’t see Messina’s result there…

By: Hadar Weiss

Hadar Weiss — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:27:33 +0000

Great post.

I recently discovered this people search tool under the name of ” itswhoyouknow” on Google Code.
Cool Thing, but how can you avoid these horrors?
Another example – searching “techcrunch” will show Chris Messina in the results as well.

By: Moti Karmona

Moti Karmona — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:37:46 +0000

Horror indeed!