Friend Of A Friend (FOAF)

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

FOAF is a project for machine-readable modelling of homepage-like profiles and social networks. Founded by Libby Miller and Dan Brickley, at the heart is a schema for defining relationships between people, and various attributes such as name, gender, and interests. To enable linking, each record includes unique identifiers for each friend (such as SHA1 checksums of their E-mail addresses, a Jabber ID, or a URI to the homepage or weblog of the person).

Based on RDF, defined using OWL and by design easily extended, it allows semantically meaningful data sharing between varied computing environments.

See:

• The FOAF project - http://www.foaf-project.org/
• FOAF vocabulary specification - http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
• http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF & http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_%28software%29