Friendly Reviews

Things have been a bit hectic lately, but I have actually managed to make something that might be worth going public with. (Actually, I’ve already pointed it out on #swig, but that’s another matter.)

Over at FilmTrust they let you not only rate and review movies, but also connect with your friends to see what kind of movies they like. Of course, this being a service from the first site on the Semantic Web, it offers a nice FOAF document, like mine.

As you can see, it contains information about the reviews I’ve written and a list of my friends, with rdfs:seeAlso‘s provided for the latter, which makes it possible to create an RSS feed with some XSLT and use of the document() function, like this: FilmTrust reviews by mortenf and friends. The output is generated via W3C’s XSLT Service — note how at least three URIs are involved in this, that’s (minimal) REST for you. Oh, let’s add another one: Via the Syndication Subscription Service.

A nice addition to the original source FOAF would be dates on the reviews — that’d make it possible to limit the size of the resulting RSS file. As it is, there’s no way to know which are “new”. Also, there are some escaping issues on FilmTrust, I had to remove golbeck and sbp from my friend list to get a running example…

Note that the XSLT takes an optional parameter, user-only. That’s provided in case you’re only interested in your own reviews — I use this to drop them into my personal planet feed.

Try subscribing to reviews from your own social network!