FOAF

FOAF (an acronym of Friend of a Friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.

FOAF is an extension to RDF and is defined using OWL. Computers may use these FOAF profiles to find, for example, all people living in Europe, or to list all people both you and a friend of you know. This is accomplished by defining relationships between people. Each profile has a unique identifier (such as the person's e-mail addresses, a Jabber ID, or a URI of the homepage or weblog of the person), which is used when defining these relationships.

The FOAF project, which defines and extends the vocabulary of a FOAF profile, was started in 2000 by Libby Miller and Dan Brickley.

Example

The following FOAF profile (written in XML format) states that Jimmy Wales is the name of the person described here. His e-mail address, homepage and depiction are resources, which means that each of them can be described using RDF as well. He has Wikipedia as an interest, and knows Angela Beesley (which is the name of a 'Person' resource).

<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

• Resource Description Framework (RDF)
• Web Ontology Language (OWL)
• Semantic Web
• Description of a Career (DOAC)
• Description of a Project (DOAP)
• SIOC
• hCard
• XHTML Friends Network (XFN)

External links

• The FOAF Project
• FOAF Specification
• RDFweb hosts the FOAF wiki
• FOAFexplorer HTML based FOAF Browser
• FOAF.Vix Visualizer and relation explorer for FOAF files
• FOAF+DOAC Project Homepage
• Advanced FOAF Explorer another XHTML based FOAF Browser
• FOAFer another HTML based FOAF Browser
• FOAFnaut SVG based FOAF Browser
• FOAF-a-matic Page to generate FOAF Descriptions
• FOAF Creator Page to generate FOAF Descriptions
• FOAFgen Convert LDIF/vCard collections to FOAF
• FOAF dataset a dataset of 201,612 FOAF triples