Clay Shirky slags the FOAF relationship vocabulary. So here's the dilemma - the point of a controlled vocabulary is to de-thesaurisize. Instead of one doctor offering a diagnosis of manic depression and a second opinion of bi-polar disorder, a controlled vocabulary says "If everyone uses bi-polar, linguistic interoperability increases, and we'll get better sharing of diagnoses." No such luck with human relations, however. I suggested a different approach: what about having a single relationship container, then having for each relationship:

• some sort of date-range info

• free-text description of the relationship (perhaps including some sort of Rating info for Reputation Management? Again, it doesn't have to be numeric...)

Update: Clay responds to critics.

• a comment points to XFN.

Here's another crummy idea I've thought of a few times: another attribute of a knows relationship could be a strength rating of 1-5 (or maybe -5 to 5). This still would be horribly crude (because exactly what dimension of the relationship are you rating?). But it would allow a little bit of Social Networking [Machine Intelligence] to be used (find me people that are 3 degrees away with minimum relationship-rating of 4, or 2 degrees with minimum rating of 3)... This seems a step up from read-their-weblog being indistinguishable from have-been-married-to-for-20-years.

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