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December 2004

December 01, 2004

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EduSpaces news

Group modifications

There have been some changes to the groups screen today - you'll see that groups now have access restrictions. Soon, you'll be able to browse both groups that a user is a member of, and groups they own. You'll then be able to see all the members of that group, view the weblog posts of just those group members, and so on.

Already, you may start to see lists of groups you're a member of, if someone else marks you as a member of a non-private group. However, the functionality to actually view those groups will come sometime over the next week.

Keywords: elgg features, permissions

Posted by EduSpaces news | 0 comment(s)

December 23, 2004

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EduSpaces news

FOAF

You'll find a link to your Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) file at the bottom of your friends box.

From the FOAF FAQ:
FOAF, or 'Friend of a Friend' provides a way to create machine-readable homepages in the Web. Technically, it is an RDF/XML 'Semantic Web' vocabulary. FOAF documents are most commonly used as a way of representing information about people in a way that is easily processed, merged and aggregated.

FOAF provides conventions for saying the sorts of things that you might say in your homepage ('My name is...', 'I work for ...', 'I'm interested in ...', 'I live near ...', 'I'm pictured in these photos...', 'I write in this weblog...'), but in a way that is easy for computers to process. Since computers are pretty dumb, and can't read human languages, we provide simplistic FOAF descriptions, to help them answer questions such as 'Show me pictures of Weblog authors interested in ... who live near here', 'Show me recent articles written by people at this meeting', 'Is this person vegetarian?'. FOAF is a 'Semantic Web' project, which is an effort to make the Web easier for machines to help us navigate.
Our FOAF implementation is currently fairly simple (and is similar to LiveJournal's). However, the files will shortly take more information from the profile screens (of course, only information that has been marked public). Eventually the FOAF file will also be used to specify files you've authored, or co-authored.

There doesn't seem to be a good FOAF graphing service, but I hope to provide a big graph of connections between people shortly.

Keywords: elgg features, foaf

Posted by EduSpaces news | 2 comment(s)