Linked Data

This page is for discussing how Linked Data might be used in Diaspora.

Diaspora might embed RDFa (or RDFa Lite) metadata on relevant pages or they may link to a dedicated RDF document using HTML LINK or similar. Currently, Diaspora's federation protocol provides user profile data as an hCard document, but it may as well provide it as an RDF document (see issue #2443).

For examples of how this metadata may be used, see Linked Data use cases. ##Basic

Profile pages

User profile pages might expose FOAF data.

• The user may be represented as a foaf:Person.
• The user's full name may be represented with the foaf:name property.
• The user's gender may be represented with the foaf:gender property.
• The user's birthday may be represented with the foaf:birthday property.
• The user's profile picture may be represented with the foaf:img property.
• Each of the user's tags may be represented with the foaf:interest property.
• The user's Diaspora account may be represented by setting their foaf:account property to the URI of the user's profile page.
• The user's Diaspora handle may be represented with the foaf:accountName property of the resource given by the URI of the user's profile page.
• The user's Diaspora pod may be represented with the foaf:accountServiceHomepage property of the resource given by the URI of the user's profile page.

Posts

User posts might expose SIOC data.

• The post may be represented as a sioc:Post.
• The post's timestamp may be represented with the dcterms:created property.
• The post's creator may be represented by setting its sioc:has_creator property to the creator's user profile page.
• Each of the post's tags may be represented with the sioc:topic property.
• Each of the post's comments may be represented with the sioc:has_reply property.

##Advanced ###User-embedded RDFa in posts Diaspora might allow users to embed arbitrary RDFa in their posts, e.g. by adding dedicated tags to Markdown or simply by allowing the relevant HTML tags (e.g. span) to be used. This would be particularly useful for applications: a music application, say, might submit a post on my Diaspora account with the title and artist of the track I am currently playing. If enchanted with RDFa (i.e. made machine-readable), this information could be consumed by other applications. For instance, my friend's music player might pick it up, and automatically add the track to his play queue.