In my current position in Business Development at Mindjet, I have been tasked with finding innovative uses for the company's software, MindManager X5 Pro. One of the directions that I have looked at is the use of MindManager as a tool for creating and visualizing the Semantic Web. I have been trying to find a compelling case for building a semantic web as well as imagining what tools would be sufficient to build it. One case for the semantic web is the informal relationships we all have with friends and colleagues. If I could share some non-confidential information with friends, they could share the information with their friends, we could build something that takes advantage of the network effect. The goal of this sharing is to be able to ask the "network" questions like "What video editing software should I use?" or "Do I know anyone who knows anyone who works at XYZ company?" or "What digital camera should I buy?"
Because it is the one subject that I know everything about, I started with creating a map of myself using MindManager X5 Pro and defined a number of predicates, like crs:friendsWith and crs:recommends. The crs: prefix stands for Charette Relationship Set, a schema that I am creating. Under each predicate is one or more objects which could be used to make a true statement with me as the subject. For example, "Michael S. Scherotter is friends with Jeff Southard." would be a valid statement that could be made from the first object of the first predicate.
At this point, the map is visual representation of a sampling of information about me, Michael Scherotter. All of the main topics are unambiguous terms that will be defined at http://www.charette.com/crs.xml. Since MindManager X5 Pro is XML-based, it is an easy task to use XSLT to transform the MindManager XML into RDF syntax, the standard method for describing nodes on the semantic web. I built a short macro in MindManager that ran the transform using the MSXML processor to create an RDF document describing me.
The next step was to create the RDF document describing each of the predicates. I did this in MindManager as well and also generated the RDF with XSLT.
As you can see, each of the predicates are defined with other namespaces prefixes, dc, and rdf, which are common schemas used in RDF documents.
As a next step, I would like to do the following:
To do this, I have created a CRS mailing list. To subscribe, send a message to majordomo@charette.com with the subject "subscribe" or enter your email address below. My email address is
3/29/2004: I fixed some validity issues with the CRS Schema.
12/30/2003: From my initial posting, some people responded with links to FoaF and relationship. I have updated my personal RDF to change some of the tags to these schemas (why reinvent the wheel). I have also removed some of the redundant tags from the Charette Relationship Set (GIF Image) becuase they were already defined in FoaF or relationship.
Michael S. Scherotter www.charette.com December 30, 2003