FOAF (acronym friend of a friend ) is a machine-readable ontology that describes people, their activities and their relationships with others and other objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows a group of people to describe social networking without the need for a centralized database.
FOAF is a descriptive vocabulary expressed using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL). Computers can use this FOAF profile to find, for example, everyone living in Europe, or to list all the people you and your friends know about. This is done by defining human relationships. Each profile has a unique identifier (such as a person's email address, international phone number, name of a Facebook account, Jabber ID, or URI of the person's homepage or weblog), used when defining this relationship.
The FOAF project, which defines and extends the FOAF profile vocabulary, began in 2000 by Libby Miller and Dan Brickley. This can be considered the first Social Semantic Web application, as it combines RDF technology with social 'web concerns'.
Tim Berners-Lee, in a 2007 essay, redefined the concept of semantic web into the Global Giant Graphic, where relationships transcend networks and documents. He considers the GGG to be on the same ground as the Internet and the World Wide Web, which states that "I declare my network in a FOAF file, and that is the beginning of the revolution."
Video FOAF (ontology)
WebID
FOAF is one of the key components of the WebID specification, especially for the TLS WebID protocol, formerly known as FOAF SSL.
Maps FOAF (ontology)
Implementation
Although this is a relatively simple use case and standard, the FOAF has had limited adoption on the web. For example, the Live Journal and DeadJournal blogging sites support FOAF profiles for all their members, the My Opera community supports FOAF profiles for members as well as groups, FOAF support is present in Identi.ca, FriendFeed, WordPress and TypePad services. The blog search platform Yandex supports searching of FOAF profile information. Prominent FOAF client support is available in the Safari web browser, in the Semantic Radar plugin for the Firefox browser, and in the RDF Detective plugin for the Google Chrome browser.
There are also modules or plugins to support FOAF profiles or FOAF SSL authorizations for programming languages, as well as for content management systems.
Example
The following FOAF profile (written in Turtle format) states that Jimmy Wales is the name of the person described here. The e-mail address, homepage and description are web resources, which means each can be described using RDF as well. He has Wikimedia as an interest, and knows Angela Beesley (who is the name of the 'People' resource).
See also
- Resource Description Framework (RDF)
- Web Ontology Language (OWL)
- Social web
- Semantic Web
- Career Description (DOAC)
- Project Description (DOAP)
- Semit-Interlinked Online Community (SIOC)
- hCard (HTML vCard)
- XHTML Friends Network (XFN)
References
External links
- Official website
- FOAF dataset dataset from 201.612 FOAF triples
- foaf-search.net a search engine for FOAF data
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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