foaf:tipjar

Once again, I find myself picking up a new technology and playing with it. The idea of a foaf:tipjar is interesting, for a number of reasons. One, it allows you to define who should retrieve payment for something. Currently, people don't really tend to get a whole lot of donations. However, if we make tools for determining how to give people money more simple, this might change. If there's a simple way - from the header of a page, for example - to extract information on who you should pay if you like the site, why, and how, suddenly people might be a bit more willing to donate.

I'm a geek. I like geek toys. To a certain extent, there are geek toys that would help me be more effective in creating a more accurate set of metadata on the web. For example, with a GPS reciever, I would be able to mark down locations of posts, photos, or other semantic events, and then use this information again later. However, if you just give me money to a foaf:tipjar account, you could be giving me money that I plan to give to terrorists in Brazil or something similar - you have no way of knowing how I plan on spending the money.

Of course, you can solve this by storing the information in a webpage, and just having your foaf:tipjar go straight to a wepage describing this information. Why require the extra step though? Wouldn't it be better to store this information semantically - so that tools can understand it, rather than requiring the human intervention?

So, while sitting around today, I decided to create a schema for that exact purpose - better defining what a foaf:tipjar is, and how it should be used. The newly created schema has a couple of properties that make using these tipjars in an application easier:

• tipjar:type
  • paypal-email
  • webpage
  • wishlist

  The "type" describes the type of tipjar. For example, an Amazon wishlist might be of type wishlist, while a Paypal email address might be dealt with by providiing a link directly to the paypal page allowing donations. This is a clue to the program interpreting this information as to what type of information is being dealt with.

• tipjar:payTo - a foaf:Agent to whom the tipjar points. This could be an organization: foaf:Group, for example, or a foaf:Person with enough information to make it a unique identifier.
• tipjar:info - a literal describing the tipjar. This might describe what the tipjar will be used for: for example, I could state that donations made to me will only be used for the proess of improving the quality of metadata I create.
• tipjar:hasTipjar - an edge between an object - be it a foaf:agent, or something else - that describes that this object has a tipjar. This might be a person, it might be a website, it might be whatever, but RDF needs to know how to relate between the parent and the Tipjar.

With this more complete definition of the foaf:tipjar format, we can easily create a tool which can have information on it. Whether it be XSLT - transform this information to a new format, stating "Donate via to for " or simply a quick button to click in your browser - "Donate to this person!" as a bookmarklet. It could even be used in pages like Amazon to describe how to pay for a specific item in RDF: simply add tipjar information to the header, and then let people add a bookmarklet to their browser bars which determines how to pay and where to pay to.

Some example uses of foaf:tipjar using the new schema definition:

A link to a webpage, to be used, for example, in pages I've created FOAF tools on.

foaf:tipjar
  tipjar:type webpage
  tipjar:payTo
    foaf:Person
      foaf:name Christopher Schmidt
      foaf:mbox crschmid@uiuc.edu
  tipjar:info Payment for new toys to expand quality of FOAF information, such as a GPS 
              reciever for more accurate geo:data for posts. 
  rdf:resource http://crschmidt.net/tipjar

An Amazon wishlist - popular in the online publishing world, for letting other people who want to buy them gifts do so.

foaf:tipjar
  tipjar:type wishlist
  tipjar:payTo
    foaf:Person
      foaf:name Christopher Schmidt
      foaf:mbox crschmid@uiuc.edu
  tipjar:info Amazon Wishlist for when you just think I should get a nice gift for some reason.
  rdf:resource http://www.amazon.com/wishlisturl.html

A tipjar pointing to the Make A Wish foundation.

foaf:tipjar
  tipjar:type webpage
  tipjar:payTo
    foaf:Group
      foaf:name Make-a-Wish Foundation
      foaf:homepage http://www.wish.org
  tipjar:info Donations go to Make-a-Wish foundation, provides gifts and services to 
              disabled children with a high expectation of dying.
  rdf:resource http://www.wish.org/home/giving-shopping/giving.htm

Paypal email address.

foaf:tipjar
  tipjar:type paypal-email
  tipjar:payTo
    foaf:Group
      foaf:name Plogs.net
      foaf:homepage http://www.plogs.net/
  tipjar:info Payments for accounts go through this email address
  rdf:resource mailto:plogs@paypal.com

A testing schema is available at http://crschmidt.net/foaf/tipjar/.