FOAF is an initialism standing for Friend of a Friend used in some social sciences as a half-joking shorthand for the fact that much of the information on which people act comes from distant sources (as in "It happened to a friend of a friend of mine") and cannot be confirmed. It is probably best known from urban legend studies; some say the term was coined by Jan Harold Brunvand, the major popularizer of that field.

---

FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is a project for machine-readable modelling of social networks founded by Libby Miller and Dan Brickley. The heart of the project is its specification which defines what statements you can make about someone, such as Name, Gender, Homepage, Weblog, ICQ/AIM/Jabber ID, Homepage of the company one works for, etc. To make linking of people possible machine wise, one includes uniquely identifiable properties of ones friends (such as SHA1 checksums of their E-Mail addresses, ones Jabber ID or an URI to the FOAF file of the person).

It is based on RDF, defined using OWL and can be easily extended, as example, with more specific relationship definitions (http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/) or statements about spoken, read and written languages of oneself (http://f14web.com.ar/inkel/rdf/schemas/lang/index.en.html).

Contents

1 Example 2 Live Forums 3 See also 4 External Links

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>
    <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>

Live Forums

• Chat (irc://irc.freenode.net/foaf) with experts on FOAF

See also

• Semantic Web
• XML
• Social network

External Links

• The FOAF Project (http://www.foaf-project.org/)
• FOAF Specification (http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/)
• RDFweb (http://rdfweb.org/)
• FOAF Wiki (http://rdfweb.org/topic/FOAFProject)
• FOAFexplorer (http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/) HTML based FOAF Browser
• FOAFnaut (http://FOAFnaut.org/) SVG based FOAF Browser
• FoaFSpace (http://www.foafspace.com/) FOAF search engine
• FOAF-a-matic (http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.html) Page to generate FOAF Descriptions

de:FOAF ja:Friend of a Friend