Began Foafverse

Tonight I began work on Foafverse. Foafverse is my answer to FOAF Explorer. FOAF Explorer is nice, but works via XSLT. RDF's serialization into XML is messy at best, and never consistent. The XSLT sheets from Explorer seem to work OK if all FOAF is formatted the same in XML. RDF in XML, as we all know, can't be predicted. This serialization shortcoming is a minus (minus in that RDF as XML can't play well the the zillions of XML tools and pipelines out there).

Anyhoot, to properly do a RDF powered site, we have to work at the Graph level. So Foafverse uses Jena so that all work is done with graphs and triples. As long as the FOAF can be parsed as RDF/XML, then we're cookin' with statements.

For extra buzzworthy-ness, Foafverse uses Spring Framework to wire everything together. It also is helping as I create nice Bean utility classes for working with Jena.

What will Foafverse do? Merely load in FOAF, save it, periodically refetch it, and query it. But working at the graph level is very liberating.

Done: Loading of FOAF into Jena and its persistent (into MySQL) Models. Querying the FOAF for persons. Webapp framework built, ant scripts, Spring application context, deployments, etc. JSPs, controllers, facade layers, etc all exist now.

TODO: shucks, tons. First up: smushing based on RDFS for FOAF plus extra OWL goodness. We have all this FOAF now, let's place on RDFS and OWL to connect the dots. Stress test Jena's support for inferencing.

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