Tim Berners-Lee interview in Technology Review

I wrote the cover story for October's MIT Technology Review magazine: an interview with World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee.

Technology Review: Is there an existing application that shows how the Semantic Web can form such connections?

Tim Berners-Lee: If you want to play with the Semantic Web, you can make a friend-of-a-friend file. In a FOAF file [the data component of a personal home page, formatted in a standardized way], you can publish stuff about yourself, your organization, your publication, places, or photographs. You can have a pointer that says “this is a photograph about me” and other data about the photograph, such as who else is in it.

To create a FOAF file, you must fill out a form, such as the one at www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.html. From this information, a Semantic Web–readable text file is generated that you can add to your personal website. There are semantic websites that will pull that data up and give you things like a list of photographs linking you to somebody else. I’m three photographs from Frank Sinatra because I’m photographed with Bill Clinton who’s been photographed with one of the Kennedys who’s been photographed with Frank Sinatra. That’s a silly application, but it really shows the power of the reuse of information.

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