FOAF

FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is an open social network. Any web site, such as a personal home page or social networking commuity site, can use FOAF to connect bteween people across sites, mking an open global web of people.

A FOAF page is a machine-readable personal profile.

The FOAF project for machine-readable modelling of homepage-like profiles and social networks. Founded by Libby Miller and Dan Brickley, at the heart is a schema for defining relationships between people, and various attributes such as name, gender, and interests. To enable linking, each record includes unique identifiers for each friend (such as a personal RDF identifier URI, SHA1 checksums of their E-mail addresses, a Jabber ID, or a URI of the homepage or weblog of the person).

Based on RDF, defined using OWL and by design easily extended, it allows meaningful data sharing between varied computing environments.

Example

<rdf:RDF
  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
  xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
  xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#">
  <foaf:Person rdf:about="#JW">
    <foaf:name>Jimmy Wales</foaf:name>
    <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:jwales@bomis.com" />
    <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.jimmywales.com/" />
    <foaf:nick>Jimbo</foaf:nick>
    <foaf:depiction rdf:resource="http://www.jimmywales.com/aus_img_small.jpg" />
    <foaf:interest>
      <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.wikimedia.org" rdfs:label="Wikipedia" />
    </foaf:interest>
    <foaf:knows>
      <foaf:Person>
        <foaf:name>Angela Beesley</foaf:name> <!-- Wikimedia Board of Trustees -->
      </foaf:Person>
    </foaf:knows>
  </foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

IRC

• Chat with experts on FOAF

See also

• Cypher - Program for generating FOAF statements from natural language descriptions
• Description of a Career (DOAC)
• Description of a Project (DOAP)
• Semantic Web
• SIOC
• Social network
• XML
• XHTML Friends Network
• hCard

External links

• The FOAF Project
• FOAF Specification
• RDFweb hosts the FOAF wiki
• FOAFexplorer HTML based FOAF Browser
• FOAF+DOAC Project Homepage
• Advanced FOAF Explorer another XHTML based FOAF Browser
• FOAFer another HTML based FOAF Browser
• FOAFnaut SVG based FOAF Browser
• foafNav another XHTML based FOAF Browser
• FoaFSpace FOAF search engine
• FOAFiler FOAF search engine
• FOAF-a-matic Page to generate FOAF Descriptions
• FOAFgen Convert LDIF/vCard collections to FOAF
• XHTML Friends Network is a similar system for tracking social relationship among webloggers.
• FOAF dataset a dataset of 201,612 FOAF triples