Amateur Fiction Online - The Web of Community Trust A Case Study in Community Focused Design for the Semantic Web

This paper focuses on two of three related projects that are currently being undertaken as part of a larger investigation into whether the semantic web can be brought to hobbyist groups on the Internet. A lot of research is being done into the semantic web and creating semantic web applications. This research tends to fall into two categories academic applications such as AKTive Space or simple, popularist systems like Friend of a Friend. Both methods have had their successes but at the same time have raised issues relating to meta data. In the case of FOAF there is a large amount of meta data being created and made available but few applications that use it. Other projects suffer from the opposite problem: envisioning inventive and useful applications which are held back by lack of data. Why does this strange dichotomy exist? One clue may be the tools available in the creation of the data. FOAF files are simple both in their content and to create indeed, journalling systems such as LiveJournal create them automatically for all their seven million users. While the users may not see much immediate benefit from it they are equally not inconvenienced by it. In comparison systems such as Aktive Space require much more effort in the input of data even with the data collection technology available. These difficulties underline the two prongs of the FicNet project: to create a system with a wide area of appeal in a non-academic field and to make that system usable by the average Internet user so that the advantages of the system outweigh any effort required to participate.