Klaas Bals' Blog

Litrik writes on his blog:

Yesterday I received an email from Plaxo with a reminder of the birthday of Marc Stevens, one of my business connections. It was quite painful because he passed away several months ago.

This sounds very akward to me as well. I knew Marc Stevens quite well. He was a raving fan of Scriptura.

How to deal with dead people's identities is indeed a problem that will have to be solved! One day, everyone of us is going to die.

Initially I thought it could be solved by setting up a webservice, where relatives should register when a person deceased (it could be the company organizing the funeral, or the government, that does this for them). All sites having accounts of the deceased person should then check with that webservice to see if the person is still alive. Of course, this wouldn't work because you have to manage identity (who is that person on the internet? which accounts does he have?). In addition, there should only be one such service, and it is clear this wouldn't work on the web (2.0).

I do believe this problem can be solved by adding a relation to FOAF or XFN that indicates when someone is dead. (I talked about FOAF and XFN a little bit before.) Searching if that was already supported today, all I could find was a statement in FOAF saying We don't nitpic about whether they're alive, dead, real, or imaginary.. It does sound shortsighted to me that they call this nitpicking...

Adding a state 'dead' or 'deceased' would make a lot of sense.