identi.ca and linked data

If you’ve already caught the micro-blogging bug identi.ca is an interesting twitter clone for a variety of reasons…not the least of which is that it’s an open source project, and has been designed to run in a decentralized way. The thing I was pleasantly surprised to see was FOAF exports like this for user networks, and HTTP URIs for foaf:Person resources:

ed@hammer:~$ curl -I http://identi.ca/user/6104
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:58:56 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1 with Suhosin-Patch
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1
Status: 303 See Other
Location: http://identi.ca/edsu
Content-Type: text/html

It looks like there’s a slight bug in the way the HTTP status is being returned, but clearly the intent was to do the right thing by httpRange-14. If I have time I’ll get laconi.ca running locally so I can confirm the bug, and attempt a fix.

It’s also cool to see that Evan Prodromou (the lead developer, and creator of identi.ca and laconi.ca) has opened a couple tickets for adding RDFa to various pages. If I have the time this would be a fun hack as well. I’d also like to take a stab at doing conneg at foaf:Person URIs to enable this sorta thing:

ed@hammer:~$ curl -I --header "Content-type: application/rdf+xml" http://identi.ca/user/6104
HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:08:42 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1 with Suhosin-Patch
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1
Location: http://web.archive.org/web/20130308050525/http://identi.ca/edsu/foaf

instead of what happens currently:

ed@hammer:~$ curl -I --header "Content-type: application/rdf+xml" http://identi.ca/user/6104
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:08:42 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1 with Suhosin-Patch
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1
Status: 303 See Other
Location: http://identi.ca/edsu
Content-Type: text/html

I guess this is also just a complicated way of saying I’m edsu on identi.ca–and that the opportunity to learn more about OAuth and XMPP is a compelling enough reason alone for me to make the switch.