Tom Morris

14 January 2008

A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.

SemanticCampProfileDiscoveryServlet.java

Just a quick post to note that I’ve open sourced SemanticCampProfileDiscoveryServlet.java, the code that was running the FOAF importer on the SemanticCamp website. Sorry for the not-particularly snappy title - I guess Java forces you to be verbose, so I might as well have verbose class names too…

The reason behind the open sourcing of it is explained at the top of the file:

The reason I’m releasing this code is because I want to prompt the RDF community into improving it and making simple, off-the-shelf solutions to common “portable social networks”/”data portability” use cases (and I want the same to happen with microformats and other approaches). Running, tested, open source code over specifications.

This is how I think DataPortability and similar efforts needs to proceed - released code speaks volumes where mailing list posts don’t. We need to sit down, write the code and solve the common use case scenarios so that people can start implementing it on public sites.

Anyway, I’ve gotta run. I’m hoping that when I get back home in an hour or so a whole open source ecosystem of portable data stuff has popped up. I should be so lucky.

Tags: