phil wilson :: a geek commodity

10:23 AM

permanent link to post  

Wednesday, May 28, 2003

Books.

The Blam! Review Creator, along with Blaxm! Reviews Exchange seeks to be a way of centralising reviews made by disparate people over the web (check out the format).

Now, all this was done a few weeks ago, and I’ve spent some time thinking about it; and it’s a good idea.

In the same vein, books.burri.to is a project to let people “swap books with people near you”, which works off of your ZIP code (for those who have one of course, unlike anyone, er, outside of the US).

I’ve said pretty much the same thing on the rdfweb-dev mailing list (but not got around to implementing yet – too much time figuring out how Jena works!), but surely all this would be so much better done by including reviews (or a link to a review file) from within your FOAF file, where you also specify your geo-location (all I can think of is nearestAirport at the moment, but I know I was reading about something better the other day – can anyone remind me?). You could then easily do things like “find me films I might like within 3 degrees of separation”, or “find other people who liked this book who live within 5 miles” and voila – list. If anyone else reviews ever anything, of course.

I’d also have thought that “swap books with people near you” would have been better off using GeoURL in the first place – then you get a worldwide service, instead of one restricted to the US.

In other news, the List of known ontologies really isn’t as useful as it could (should?) be. What would be better would be a list of the ontologies (as exists now), then when you click on one, you get a tree-like structure displaying the Class and Property relationships. This is what people need to be able to see RDF and how it works, at least to begin with. Just presenting a big list where properties and classes are listed all jumbled up doesn’t really help anyone.