Stephanie Booth asks:
I vaguely remember somebody telling me about some emerging “standard” (too big a word) for encoding language skills. Or was it a dream?
That would’ve been me, showing markup from the FOAFX beta from Paola Di Maio and friends, which explores the extension of FOAF with expertise information. This is part of the ExpertFinder discussions alongside the FOAF project (see also wiki, mailing list). FOAFX and the ExpertFinder community are looking at ways of extending FOAF to better describe people’s expertise; both self-described and externally accredited. This is at once a fascinating, important and terrifyingly hard to scope problem area. It touches on longstanding “Web of trust” themes, on educational metadata standards, and on the various ways of characterising topics or domains of expertise. In other words, in any such problem space, there will always be multiple ways of “doing it”. For example, here is how the Advogato community site characterises my expertise regarding opensource software: foaf.rdf (I’m in the Journeyer group, apparently; some weighted average of people’s judgements about me).
One thing FOAFX attempts is to describe language skills. For this, they extend the idiom proposed by Inkel some years ago in his “Speaks, Reads, Writes” schema. In the original (which is Spanish, but see also English version), the classification was effectively binary: one could either speak, read, or write a language; or one couldn’t. You could also say you ‘mastered’ it, meaning that you could speak, read and write it. In FOAFX, this is handled differently: we get a 1-5 score. I like this direction, as it allows me to express that I have some basic capability in Spanish, without appearing to boast that I’m anything like “fluent”. But … am I a “1″ or a “2″? Should I poll my long-suffering Spanish-speaking friends? Take an online quiz? Introducing numbers gives the impression of mathematical precision, but in skill characterisation this is notoriously hard (and not without controversy).
My take here is that there’s no right thing to do. So progress and experimentation are to be celebrated, even if the solution isn’t perfect. On language skills, I’d love some way also to allow people to say “I’m learning language X”, or “I’m happy to help you practice your English/Spanish/Japanese/etc.”. Who knows, with more such information available, online Social Network sites could even prove useful…
Here btw is the current RDF markup generated by FOAFX:
<foaf:Person rdf:ID="me">
<foaf:mbox_sha1>6e80d02de4cb3376605a34976e31188bb16180d0</foaf:mbox_sha1>
<foaf:givenname>Dan</foaf:givenname>
<foaf:family_name>Brickley</foaf:family_name>
<foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/" />
<foaf:weblog rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/words/" />
<foaf:depiction rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/images/me.jpg" />
<foaf:jabberID>danbrickley@gmail.com</foaf:jabberID>
<foafx:language>
<foafx:Language>
<foafx:name>English</foafx:name>
<foafx:speaking>5</foafx:speaking>
<foafx:reading>5</foafx:reading>
<foafx:writing>5</foafx:writing>
</foafx:Language>
</foafx:language>
<foafx:language>
<foafx:Language>
<foafx:name>Spanish</foafx:name>
<foafx:speaking>1</foafx:speaking>
<foafx:reading>1</foafx:reading>
<foafx:writing>1</foafx:writing>
</foafx:Language>
</foafx:language>
<foafx:expertise>
<foafx:Expertise>
<foafx:field>::</foafx:field>
<foafx:fluency>
<foafx:Language>
<foafx:name>English</foafx:name>
</foafx:Language>
</foafx:fluency>
</foafx:Expertise>
</foafx:expertise>
</foaf:Person>
The apparent redundancy in the markup (expertise, Expertise) is due to RDF’s so-called “striped” syntax. I have an old introduction to this idea; in short, RDF lets you define properties of things, and categories of thing. The FOAFX design effectively says, “there is a property of a person called “expertise” which relates that person to another thing, an “Expertise”, which itself has properties like “fluency”.
The FOAFX design tries to navigate between generic and specific, by including language-oriented markup as well as more generic skill descriptions. I think this is probably the right way to go. There are many things that we can say about human languages that don’t apply to other areas of expertise (eg. opensource software development). And there many things we can say about expertise in general (like expressions of willingness to learn, to teach, … indications of formal qualification) which are cross domain. Similarly, there are many things we might say in markup about opensource projects (picking up on my Advogato mention earlier) which have nothing to do with human languages. Yet both human language expertise and opensource skills are things we might want to express via FOAF extensions. For example, the DOAP project already lets us describe opensource projects and our roles in them.
The Semantic Web design challenge here is to provide a melting pot for all these different kinds of data, one that allows each specific problem to be solved adequately in a reasonable time-frame, without precluding the possibility for richer integration at a later date. I have a hunch that the Advogato design, which expresses skills in terms of group membership, could be a way to go here.
This is related to the idea of expressing group-membership criteria through writing SPARQL queries. For example, we can talk about the Group of people who work for W3C. Or we can talk about the Group of people who work for W3C as listed authoritatively on the W3C site. Both rules are expressible as queries; the latter a query that says things about the source of claims, as well as about what those claims assert. This notion of a group defined by a query allows for both flavours; the definition could include criteria relating to the provenance (ie. source) of the claims, but it needn’t. So we could express the idea of people who speak Spanish, or the idea of people who speak french according to having passed some particular test, or being certified by some agency. In either case, the unifying notion is “person X is in group Y”, where Y is a group identified by some URL. What I like about this model, is it allows for a very loose division of labour: skill-related markup is necessarily going to be widely varied. Yet the idea that such scattered evidence boils down to people falling into definable groups, gives some overall cohesion to this diversity. I could for example run a query asking for people with (foafx idiom) “Spanish skills of 2 or more”. I could add a constraint that the person be at least a “Journeyer” regarding their opensource skills, according to Advogato, or perhaps mix in data expressed in DOAP terms regarding their roles in opensource project work. These skills effectively define groups (loosly, sets) of people, and skill search can be pictured in venn diagram terms. Of course all this depends on getting enough data out there for any such queries to be worthwhile. Maybe a Facebook app that re-published data outside of Hotel Facebook would be a way of bootstrapping things here?
