Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, 2nd Edition

FOAF

FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is a format for supporting distributed descriptions of people and their relationships. The name Friend of a Friend is intended to evoke the fundamental relationship that holds in social networks; you have direct knowledge of your own friends, but only through your network can you access the friends of your friends. Though the FOAF project dates back to early in the year 2000, and thus predated many of the most popular social networking web sites like Friendster, LinkedIn, and Facebook, many of the issues that FOAF was designed to deal with are at the center of the discussion of the social network industry ten years later: privacy, ownership, and distribution of data. FOAF began with a simple observation: If we are ...