Foaf Project

foaf-a-matic about specification developers foafcorp contact

Tools

Start with the toys!

In the Press

"I blame Kevin Bacon. It's only fair: he probably doesn't know it, but the floppy fringed actor's influence on the internet has been long felt, if unusual - and this year it's everywhere." — Ben Hammersley compares social networks in Click to the Clique in The Guardian Online

"Why go to all the bother of using Google when the metadata about the data is already close at hand? And more to the point - from someone you know, therefore there's a level of trust between developers." — Foaf from a java developers point of view.

"We make our tools, and then they shape us." — An article links changes in software with social evolution.

"It's not what you know, it's who you know." — Edd Dumbill explores an XML and RDF application known as Friend-of-a-Friend.

"There's been a lot of discussion lately. . . about building secure, cross-site identity systems, much of that discussion now centering on how FOAF could be used as the core of such a system.": — Moveable Type interfaced with community meta data

"FOAF provides about two dozen useful terms for describing people." — Parsing FOAF with PHP

"The company behind one of the weblog world's most popular tools is preparing to launch a new service" — Six Apart to include automatic creation of a foaf file to its TypePad application.

Validation Results

Someday technology will catch up with dan

Using foaf:weblog, instructions

Foaf smiley faces Here's how to add a foaf:weblog property to your FOAF file. You can use it anywhere there is an element describing a Person (or for that matter a company, group etc). It should be included in a sub-element that mentions their weblog. It doesn't matter exactly where you put the foaf:weblog entry, so long as it is immediately 'inside' the foaf:Person element. This same technique works if you are describing your friends and collaborators in a FOAF file; just add in a foaf:weblog property inside the foaf:Person section that describes them. Here is an example: View entire article

FOAFbot and Gnome Dashboard

Foaf smiley faces Edd Dumbill writes with news of his latest work on FOAFbot, the chat-based FOAF aggregator.

FOAFbot is now based on the 'twisted' framework, opening up possibilities for various new interfaces to the data beyond the current IRC one. This is interesting as it makes it easier for people to adapt FOAFbot, eg. for instance messenger or HTTP interfaces, or to hook it up to alternate front-ends such as foafnaut. Edd's weblog provides more details on all this, including links to source code and a teaser screenshot of FOAFbot data showing up in Gnome Dashboard . Nice work! :)

nearestAirport documentation in Japanese

Foaf smiley faces From kota's weblog, details on using 'nearestAirport' in FOAF files. Thanks kota!

The 'contact:nearestAirport' property is a way of indicating very broadly which part(s) of the world you're from, without needing to know exact coordinates or giving away too much detail. It isn't part of the FOAF vocabulary, but can be included as an extension in any FOAF file. A few 'nearestAirport' links: pixel's writeup, swad-e developer map, FOAF people map

SemaView, Social Networking and FOAF

Foaf smiley faces SemaView have a nice writeup of their work with RDF, Semantic Web and FOAF: Social Networking utilizing the Intelligent Internet

Actually it was published back in March, but I missed the chance to write about it then. Better late than never. The article introduces the basic concepts of the Semantic Web and RDF using their FOAF browser, built using Java and PHP. The article goes on to talk about the potential business value of such work, giving a brief case study of the Ecademy networking site.

The other publications on SemaView's site are worth a read too. They've made an effort to provide a friendly overview of Semantic Web technologies, and to provide a business-oriented perspective as well as a technical one.

Updated Autocreation tool from digiboy

Foaf smiley faces Marcus Campbell has updated his FOAF Autocreation tool.

The FOAF autocreation script takes two links - one to your current FOAF file and one to your OPML blogroll - and produces a brand new FOAF file for you by attempting FOAF autodiscovery on every site your OPML file mentions. See the autofoaf page for more details on this tool.

So this is yet more reason to take a few seconds to make an auto-discovery link to your FOAF file in from the <head> of your Web page, to give software tools a hint about how to find it. This auto-discovery syntax is detailed in the FOAF spec, but here it is once more as a reminder:

 <link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" 
title="FOAF" href="foaf.rdf" />

...where "foaf.rdf" is a relative link to your FOAF file, with the name changed appropriately.

The upcoming TypePad weblog hosting service from Six Apart also makes use of this auto-discovery markup, as does the XML::FOAF Perl software library, so it is increasingly worthwhile adding in the FOAF autodiscovery link.

The basic idea for FOAF auto-discovery is to remove the need to remember (and type in) a separate URL for your FOAF file. Instead of remembering both your homepage and FOAF address, just know the former and make sure it references your FOAF file in a way that software tools can follow. Less work for humans, more work for machines, just as it should be.

Further reading: Autodiscovery page in the FoafProject wiki.