The People Project

There are people inside your computer, in your disk, on the web pages your browse. However, most of our software systems don't treat people as first-class object. The purpose of this project is to explore bringing the people out of hiding.

FOAF is a semantic web project focusing on representing persons. We need to study how to represent people, including whether or not inheritance should be used, the scheme for persistance (foaf, other?), the fields that should be kept.

The WebTop project has begun exploration in this area. Iman Sadreddin has created a site for entering persons, and a web service that allows programs to query on this person database. Juliana Chan created a Webtop browser that will list the people associated with the domain of a page that is invoked.

It would definitely be nice see, when browsing a page, links to 1) the author, 2) people referred to in the page..It would also be nice to be able to associate from the author-- see her coauthors, colleagues, papers, etc. The latter might be added to Tim Chan's Webtop browser, which displays a tree of things.

Another idea is to have a people/paper research browser, an extension of scholar.google.com. Here web pages are ignored, we just view people and research papers, and we can associate freely between citations, people, etc. Might require scraping Google at this point as there is no API to Scholar.

Another issue concerns bootstrapping a system with data-- where can we get the data we need? How do we get people to buy into registering?

Another issue is sharing. Are we talking about a single registry that stores all persons in the world, or a distributed database. In the case of the latter, how do registries talk? Does each person have his own registry of people she knows, which is shared with friends and neighbors?