Seth Ladd's Blog

Why do I have a great eBay feedback rating, but no way of moving that trust rating over to Amazon? I worked hard to get all the feedback, but when I want to sell something on Amazon, it's like I'm a brand new person. This sounds like a job for FOAF . A specialization of the Trust Ontology can be applied to trust in auction settings. Then, using some OWL magic, I could quite easily map myself on eBay to myself on Amazon. Then, ta da, my Amazon avatar doesn't look so bad anymore. I wonder if this is doable with eBay's API and Amazon's APIs (SOAP and RESTful)? Sounds like an interesting application of those APIs plus FOAF. Is this a good proof of concept for the Semantic Web? What would stop it from being deployed?

I put food on the table by developing Java web services (for both humans and machines). I work primarily with Open Source tools, and contribute many bug reports and an occasional patch or two. In the open source world, there are typically more than one programmer with commit access to the project. Usually, the existing developers will vote on the new developer. The voting criteria differ between projects, but usually it comes down to an issue of trust . Is the new developer trusted to have write access? I believe that a correctly tripled Semantic Web could help with that question. The data for determining trust, in this case, is ample throughout the web. For instance, as a developer, I leave breadcrumbs everywhere: bugzilla posts, JIRA posts, mailing list posts, CVS commits (on the web via ViewCVS). Let's pretend in some magical world all those actions and events had triples to describe them. It's conceivable to write a Rule against the Semantic Web that would say "...