purlz for the people

For a long time I’ve been thinking how useful it would be to give PURLS to people as a key part for managing evolving social networks. And now that the new purl work we’re doing at Zepheira (which is downright scary-good due to in part a rock solid engineering team and the use of NetKernel as a key underlying technology) will include support for identification of non-document resources, this will soon be possible.

Recently, Brian has been reflecting on his building of some very cool FOAF tools. And now whats even cooler is that it looks like Brian is on the case …

This exercise has also inspired me to make some progress on my goal to create some good tools to lower the bar to FOAF usage. I am going to leverage the PURLS work that we are doing for the OCLC. This will allow us to create permanent, resolvable names for ourselves that transcend where we currently hang our hats*. This will allow the networks to be more resilient. As many links as I am finding, there have been a ton of broken links (presumably people who have moved on) that would have enriched the result set even further!

I suspect he’ll have a production ready system in place by sometime tomorrow 😉