FEW2007: find people on the Semantic Web

The 2nd International ExpertFinder Workshop: Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics (FEW2007) will be co-located with ISWC 2007 in Busan, Korea on November 12th, 2007.
ExpertFinder is an emerging collaborative initiative with the aim of devising vocabulary, rule extensions (for e.g. FOAF and SIOC) and best practices to annotate personal home pages, as well as web pages of institutions, conferences, publication indexes, etc. with adequate metadata to enable computer agents to find experts on particular topics.
I think FEW2007 will be an interesting workshop.
People search is a growing niche market on the Web. While nearly 50% of all web searches are done on Google, there is no clear winners in many of vertical search domains (e.g., travel, health and people).
Startup Spock is a leader in the people search domain (others include Pipl, PeekYou and Wink). Spock currently builds its database by scanning Web sites that people regularly post information about themselves and others, e.g., LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook.
I think Semantic Web ontology like FOAF and SIOC will play important role in the development of people search engine. First, we have tons of FOAF and SIOC data running wild on the Web. Second, FOAF and SIOC allow more expressive representation of social network information. Third, people profiles described using these ontologies are more suitable for logical inference. It can help to enable knowledge fusion and data mining. Finally, publishing people profiles and social network information in RDF is less involved than publishing API for accessing back-end databases.
If all social network sites adopt FOAF as the standard vocabulary for expressing user profile, it will be easy for someone to build mashups of social networks across multiple sites (e.g., MySpace + Facebook + LinkedIn). Furthermore, if we treat each user profile as an RDF graph, we will be able to exploit SPARQL query services to query distributed data on the Web and begin to ask complex questions about our human social networks.