VRM with FOAF + OpenID
A quick note-to-self. I’m currently working on some other FOAF + OpenID stuff, so this is nearby enough that I might well put together a demo in the near future…but not today.
Tim Bray discusses Changing your address in the context of Vendor Relationship Management, prompted by “Feeds-Based VRM”: A Web-Centric Approach to VRM Implementation. The question is how you keep a vendor (or other contact) aware of your current address.
I came to the same conclusion as Tim, that feeds aren’t really necessary for this kind of thing, the data can be put directly on the Web and the contact given the appropriate URI. In comments over there I pointed to Tim Berners-Lee’s Give yourself a URI - an online FOAF profile solves most of the problem. The part it doesn’t solve is access control - you might not want to make your address public. But with the help of linked data, off-the-shelf tools and a little scripting, this is pretty easy to fix.
First of all, looking at how you might represent this information, vCard is the dominant model for this kind of info. Whether that’s expressed in the original vCard format or hCard or RDFa or RDF/XML doesn’t really matter. These can all be mapped to the RDF model, which is key to what follows… Here’s the relevant bit of a vCard in Turtle syntax (first pass, probably not 100% correct):
prefix : <http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#> .
[ a :VCard;
:agent <#me>
:homeAdr [
a :Address;
:street-address "7, Mozzanella" ;
:country-name "Italy"
] ;
]
Now I could just dump this in my public FOAF profile at, say http://example.org/public/me. But because I want the address to be restricted, I’ll separate the information (following the principles of linked data) like this -
in http://example.org/public/me -
prefix : <http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#> .
[ a :VCard;
:agent <#me>
:homeAdr <http://example.org/restricted/myaddress> .
]
and in <http://example.org/restricted/myaddress> :
prefix : <http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#> .
<> a :Address;
:street-address "7, Mozzanella" ;
:country-name "Italy" .
Now I need to wrap the latter part in authentication/authorization. Traditionally I might hard-code a list of who can see this data, but there’s a neater way. Somewhere I’ll put statements like the following (with proper URIs as appropriate):
<#me> foaf:knows [
<personA> foaf:openid <personAopenID>
]
<#me> x:businessContact [
<personB> foaf:openid <personBopenID>
]
<#me> x:businessContact [
<personC> foaf:openid <personCopenID>
]
<#me> x:businessContact [
<personD> foaf:openid <personDopenID>
]
Anyone wishing to see the restricted info will be asked for their OpenID URI. Whether they can see a particular resource can be governed by simple rules, for example expressed through string-templated SPARQL queries:
SELECT ?person
WHERE {
?person foaf:openid $openid$ .
OPTIONAL { <#me> foaf:knows ?person }
OPTIONAL { <#me> x:businessContact ?person }
}
Ok, that’s very sketchy, but hopefully gives the idea. To be properly declarative in practice you’d probably want to put the access rules in a separate chunk of RDF, and query across the whole lot. But given decent libraries (e.g. the OpenID PHP lib worked pretty much out of the box for me, and ARC is a really straightforward PHP RDF toolkit), we’re talking about maybe a days work to write and deploy the scripts - which could be used by anyone else with regular PHP-capable hosting.
A Web-centric approach to VRM should use the Web, and as Berners-Lee himself recently put it:
Linked Data is the Semantic Web done as it should be. It is the Web done as it should be.
