FOAF

Last updated
FOAF
Friend of a friend
FoafLogo.svg
FOAF logo
AbbreviationFOAF
StatusPublished
Year started2000;23 years ago (2000)
First publishedJune 3, 2005;18 years ago (2005-06-03)
Latest version0.99
January 14, 2014;9 years ago (2014-01-14)
SeriesNamespace Document
AuthorsDan Brickley, Libby Miller
Base standards RDF, OWL
Domain Semantic Web
License CC BY 1.0
Website xmlns.com/foaf/spec/

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 themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.

Contents

FOAF is a descriptive vocabulary expressed using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (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 yours know. [1] [2] This is accomplished by defining relationships between people. Each profile has a unique identifier (such as the person's e-mail addresses, international telephone number, Facebook account name, 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. It can be considered the first Social Semantic Web application,[ citation needed ] in that it combines RDF technology with 'social web' concerns.[ clarification needed ]

Tim Berners-Lee, in a 2007 essay, [3] redefined the semantic web concept into the Giant Global Graph (GGG), where relationships transcend networks and documents. He considers the GGG to be on equal ground with the Internet and the World Wide Web, stating that "I express my network in a FOAF file, and that is a start of the revolution."

WebID

FOAF is one of the key components of the WebID specifications, in particular for the WebID+TLS protocol, which was formerly known as FOAF+SSL.

Deployment

Although it is a relatively simple use-case and standard, FOAF has had limited adoption on the web. For example, the Live Journal and DeadJournal blogging sites support FOAF profiles for all their members, [4] My Opera community supported FOAF profiles for members as well as groups. FOAF support is present on Identi.ca, FriendFeed, WordPress and TypePad services. [5]

Yandex blog search platform supports search over FOAF profile information. [6] Prominent client-side FOAF support was available in Safari [7] web browser before RSS support was removed in Safari 6 and in the Semantic Radar [8] plugin for Firefox browser. Semantic MediaWiki, the semantic annotation and linked data extension of MediaWiki supports mapping properties to external ontologies, including FOAF which is enabled by default.

There are also modules or plugins to support FOAF profiles or FOAF+SSL authorization for programming languages, [9] [10] as well as for content management systems. [11]

Example

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

@prefixrdf:<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>.@prefixrdfs:<http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>.@prefixfoaf:<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>.<#JW>afoaf:Person;foaf:name"James Wales";foaf:mbox<mailto:jwales@bomis.com>;foaf:homepage<http://www.jameswales.com>;foaf:nick"Jimbo";foaf:depiction<http://www.jameswales.com/aus_img_small.jpg>;foaf:interest<http://www.wikimedia.org>;foaf:knows[afoaf:Person;foaf:name"Angela Beesley"].<http://www.wikimedia.org>rdfs:label"Wikimedia".

History

Versions

Versions table
VersionDatenamespace URIDescription
Old version, no longer maintained: 0.98August 9, 2010 http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
Current stable version:0.99January 14, 2014 [12] http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ Current version

Paddington Edition

Legend:
Old version
Older version, still maintained
Latest version
Latest preview version
Future release

See also

Related Research Articles

The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats, with Turtle currently being the most widely used notation.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for various domains: the nouns representing classes of objects and the verbs representing relations between the objects.

RDF Schema (Resource Description Framework Schema, variously abbreviated as RDFS, RDF(S), RDF-S, or RDF/S) is a set of classes with certain properties using the RDF extensible knowledge representation data model, providing basic elements for the description of ontologies. It uses various forms of RDF vocabularies, intended to structure RDF resources. RDF and RDFS can be saved in a triplestore, then one can extract some knowledge from them using a query language, like SPARQL.

SPARQL is an RDF query language—that is, a semantic query language for databases—able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. It was made a standard by the RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG) of the World Wide Web Consortium, and is recognized as one of the key technologies of the semantic web. On 15 January 2008, SPARQL 1.0 was acknowledged by W3C as an official recommendation, and SPARQL 1.1 in March, 2013.

A web resource is any identifiable resource present on or connected to the World Wide Web. Resources are identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). In the Semantic Web, web resources and their semantic properties are described using the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Notation3, or N3 as it is more commonly known, is a shorthand non-XML serialization of Resource Description Framework models, designed with human-readability in mind: N3 is much more compact and readable than XML RDF notation. The format is being developed by Tim Berners-Lee and others from the Semantic Web community. A formalization of the logic underlying N3 was published by Berners-Lee and others in 2008.

RDFa or Resource Description Framework in Attributes is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents. It also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.

DOAP is an RDF Schema and XML vocabulary to describe software projects, in particular free and open source software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semantically Interlinked Online Communities</span>

Semantically Interlinked Online Communities Project is a Semantic Web technology. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine-readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in Internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing/searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blank node</span>

In RDF, a blank node is a node in an RDF graph representing a resource for which a URI or literal is not given. The resource represented by a blank node is also called an anonymous resource. According to the RDF standard a blank node can only be used as subject or object of an RDF triple.

The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is a W3C Recommendation. RIF is part of the infrastructure for the semantic web, along with (principally) SPARQL, RDF and OWL. Although originally envisioned by many as a "rules layer" for the semantic web, in reality the design of RIF is based on the observation that there are many "rules languages" in existence, and what is needed is to exchange rules between them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linked data</span> Structured data and method for its publication

In computing, linked data is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages only for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. Part of the vision of linked data is for the Internet to become a global database.

N-Triples is a format for storing and transmitting data. It is a line-based, plain text serialisation format for RDF graphs, and a subset of the Turtle format. N-Triples should not be confused with Notation3 which is a superset of Turtle. N-Triples was primarily developed by Dave Beckett at the University of Bristol and Art Barstow at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Microdata is a WHATWG HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users. Search engines benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data because it allows them to understand the information on web pages and provide more relevant results to users. Microdata uses a supporting vocabulary to describe an item and name-value pairs to assign values to its properties. Microdata is an attempt to provide a simpler way of annotating HTML elements with machine-readable tags than the similar approaches of using RDFa and microformats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Named graph</span> Extension of the RDF data model

Named graphs are a key concept of Semantic Web architecture in which a set of Resource Description Framework statements are identified using a URI, allowing descriptions to be made of that set of statements such as context, provenance information or other such metadata.

XHTML+RDFa is an extended version of the XHTML markup language for supporting RDF through a collection of attributes and processing rules in the form of well-formed XML documents. XHTML+RDFa is one of the techniques used to develop Semantic Web content by embedding rich semantic markup. Version 1.1 of the language is a superset of XHTML 1.1, integrating the attributes according to RDFa Core 1.1. In other words, it is an RDFa support through XHTML Modularization.

JSON-LD is a method of encoding linked data using JSON. One goal for JSON-LD was to require as little effort as possible from developers to transform their existing JSON to JSON-LD. JSON-LD allows data to be serialized in a way that is similar to traditional JSON. It was initially developed by the JSON for Linking Data Community Group before being transferred to the RDF Working Group for review, improvement, and standardization, and is currently maintained by the JSON-LD Working Group. JSON-LD is a World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asset Description Metadata Schema</span>

The Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) is a common metadata vocabulary to describe standards, so-called interoperability assets, on the Web.

GoodRelations is a Web Ontology Language-compliant ontology for Semantic Web online data, dealing with business-related goods and services. It handles the individual relationships between a buyer, a seller and the products and services offered. In November 2012, it was integrated into the Schema.org ontology.

References

  1. XML Watch: Finding friends with XML and RDF by Edd Dumbill in IBM DeveloperWorks
  2. XML Watch: Support online communities with FOAF by Edd Dumbill in IBM DeveloperWorks
  3. Berners Lee, Tim. "Giant Global Graph". Decentralized Information Group. Archived from the original on 2016-07-13.
  4. "LiveJournal FOAF". LiveJournal. Archived from the original on 2010-01-18..
  5. "Known FOAF data providers". FOAF project. Archived from the original on 2010-02-26.
  6. "press release on the social networking support". Yandex. 2008-08-15.
  7. "FOAF Support in Safari RSS". eJohn..
  8. "Semantic Radar plugin for the Firefox browser". Mozilla. Archived from the original on 2014-01-08. Retrieved 2012-02-20.
  9. "FOAF support module for Perl". CPAN.
  10. "FOAF+SSL authentication support for Perl". CPAN.
  11. http://drupal.org/project/foaf - FOAF support for Drupal
  12. Brickley, Dan; Miller, Libby (2014-01-14). "FOAF Vocabulary Specification 0.99". xmlns.com. FOAF project. Archived from the original on 2022-03-03. Retrieved 2022-03-31.