a person on the web

Recently, there has been news around the .tel and .name top level domains.  See Verisign Acquires .Name Guys and Telnic at DemoFall.  Each allows a person to reserve a place on the web, but in different ways.  With .name, you get a reserved domain and e-mail address.  With .tel, you get a place where useful information about a person is made available to applications through DNS: phone number, e-mail, etc.

I wondered, why doesn’t Telnic support the semantic web standard?  See Annotating DNS with personal information, where Jon Udell touched on that question. Henri Asseily, Telnic’s Chief Strategist, replied:

“But what web-based conventions can’t do is make it very easy to discover and/or use this data. Let’s say I have a foaf.xml document somewhere at xxx.com/aaa/me.xml. How (1) do I tell people that it’s there, (2) know that it adheres to foaf and (3) make it accessible and parseable quickly by a gprs phone?”

Why not expose that through the .tel domain? A request for http://henri.tel could follow linked data techniques and returned the semantic formated information.  Other protocols may still be supported, if others means of access are required.  

The following is a simple picture when I think about how people might be represented in the semantic web: 

In the semantic web, each person has a URL referencing useful structured information: weblog, e-mail, who they know, etc. Here, a user George has a fixed URL http://path/to/permanent/home.  This allows any site to reference that URL and associate additional information.   In this picture, I put a “gold ring” around the linked user, indicating that the source site is adding other useful information about that user, on the end of a “sameAs” relationship. 

A social networking site could link to this user and then express additional friend relationships, comments, etc.  A business networking site can express other relationships, like colleague/coworker, etc.  Any site can link to this user and represent additional information associated with this person.  

These sites are layered over a web of data.  Because there is a fixed URL for a person, you have a way to trace all information which has been associated with that individual.  Here, a permanent URL that never goes away seems useful.  Telnic allows people to sell/transfer their domain name to another user.  It is one problem if someone can dial Emma by referencing emma.tel, and then find themself connected to a different person.  In a web of data, it is another problem if all the links to that individual now are invalid.  New information associated with that person is now confused with the old.  Or, sites set up to use the foaf:knows to enable additional permissions would now reference the wrong individual.  Similarly, what happens if you don’t renew the yearly payment on that domain?  The domain may be sold/lost, and you are back to the same problem.