You know that situation. Every time you want to order flowers via the Web or book a flight (where you not happen to be a premium member of the airline’s frequent fliers club having all the data handy), you are urged to fill in the most stupid and plain forms. Day in, day out, the same boring and time-consuming activity.
How about a sort of Mechanical Turk that does the dirty work for you?
Ok, enough words: here is my take on it, using RDForms‘ fusion capabilities, one can fill in her profile data from one’s FOAF file:
profile auto-complete demo based on RDForms fusion algorithm
Check out http://ld2sd.deri.org/pac/ and let me know what and how we could extend that little toy (maybe pre-selecting fields or protect certain fields, etc. ?). The code is also available at the pushback project svn.
Warning: this is a Sunday-morning hack, not a ready-to-go product, so please, bear with it/me 
I really like this idea, as you have said it reduces laborious task of form filling. Does it require known mappings though between the information in your foaf file and the relevant fields that the information should be placed in? I.e. The form field for one’s name would have to be named appropriately in order for the literal described by foaf:name to be included.
Posted by Matthew Rowe | 2009-04-06, 11:35Thanks Matthew!
Yes, basically one has to map it manually. That shall and will be extended to a sort of ‘visual’ editing based on a graph rendering or the like. Gotta check out (happy to learn about out-of-the-box rendition that allows me to do that). Please note that this mapping has to be done only once, that is, per class of FOAF document. Say you have your FOAF document and want to use it for pac. Well, then you have to provide this mapping. For the majority of use cases, however, where people will expose via site-wide mechanisms such as found in FriendFeed or the like (actually I’m currently toying around with LinkedIn/vCard2FOAF, etc.) this mapping has to be provided only once (per site
However, still it should be up to the user to decide which fields she likes to expose, so in any case somewhere in the process _some_ human intervention might be necessary, IMHO.
Cheers,
Michael
Posted by woddiscovery | 2009-04-06, 14:38Definitely. This process reminds me of sxip, but it is more extensible and adaptive (ie. I change my location details in my FOAF file and this is reflected in the form that is automatically filled in).
Re: control, there could be some mapping protection option, so that when the user views their FOAF file they are able to specify which fields should be accessible. Priority levels could also be attributed to duplicate properties, ie: mbox (public) > mbox (work) > mbox (private).
Posted by Matthew Rowe | 2009-04-07, 17:37