What language do I speak?

This is an exercise in searching the semantic Web for some information. I will write a story about what and why and how later...

This page lets you ask some basic questions from Libby Miller's database of public FOAF information. If you create some new foaf data (including language information would be nice) you can add it to the database in real time. Otherwise the database tries to crawl the Semantic web for more information every week - or use the advanced version to work with other sources.

or ask about specific languages

And some from when this was being done

The advanced version of this page allows you to make your own queries. This was put together by Charles McCathieNevile but most of tech work was done by Libby Miller.

Notes and "to do" list

• For the most part this relies on FOAF data that has a givenname and a family_name property available (exception is the first query). So it doesn't get the full set of people in the database
• It would be nice to have some flag icons
• Learn to write Japanese in Amaya
• Make a tool for people to create language data easily. If you have an Xforms-capable browser you could download the tarball of experimental foaf-generating Xforms stuff from Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer and Chaals - it is a bit of a mess, but it works locally, ending up with a file called foaf.rdf. Chaals has been using X-smiles and Sebastian has been using DENG, and they interoperate which is a good start.
• This database believes everything it is told at the moment - find someone to fix that or work from a more powerful (and less trusting) database

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