A friend and colleague of mine drew my attention to Alexandre Passant’s service to extract your flickr profile in RDF (and, possibly, bind it to FOAF). Nice stuff. The only small caveat I ran into is related to the terminology used by flickr. Naïvely, I believed that the name I use on flickr (ivan_herman) is my UID. So I went to Alexandre’s service, and generated:
http://apassant.net/home/2007/12/flickrdf/data/people/ivan_herman
which is practically empty. However, Alexandre helped my out here (thanks!), telling me that what flickr calls a UID is a pretty cryptic stuff (26226551@N00 in my case…) that one can find out, for example, by looking at:
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/?method=flickr.people.getInfo
And, indeed, that worked well: I can get to my flickr profile via
http://apassant.net/home/2007/12/flickrdf/data/people/26226551@N00
and I can bind to my foaf file by adding
<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://apassant.net/home/2007/12/flickrdf/data/people/26226551@N00"/>
Cool! The extra nice aspect of this is that it is not a one-time action, but a stable URI. What I mean is: if I change my profile in flickr, the RDF extraction will reveal the new information right away. This is better than, say, the facebook foaf generator of Matthew Rowe that does a one time conversion of your facebook data, but that you have to repeat every time you do a change in facebook. (No critique on Matthew. I can very well imagine that setting up a full service like Alexandre’s is trickier in the case of facebook. This should really be a ground service by facebook itself…)
