XML Hacks

Identify Yourself with FOAF

FOAF provides a framework for creating and publishing personal information in a machine-readable fashion. As you learn FOAF, you will also get acquainted in a practical way with RDF.

The Friend of a Friend or FOAF project (http://www.foaf-project.org/) is a community-driven effort to define an RDF vocabulary for expressing metadata about people and their interests, relationships, and activities. Founded by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, the FOAF project is an open, community-led initiative that is tackling head-on a small and relatively manageable piece of the W3C’s wider Semantic Web goal of creating a machine-processable web of data. Achieving this goal quickly requires a network effect that will rapidly yield a mass of data. Network effects mean people. It seems a fairly safe bet that any early Semantic Web successes are going to be riding on the back of people-centric applications. Indeed, everything interesting that we might want to describe on the Semantic Web was arguably created by or involves people in some form or another. And FOAF is all about people.

FOAF facilitates the creation of the Semantic Web equivalent of the archetypal personal homepage: my name is Leigh, this is a picture of me, I’m interested in XML, and here are some links to my friends. And just like the HTML version, FOAF documents can be linked together to form a web of data, with well-defined semantics.

Being a W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) application (http://www.w3.org/RDF/ ...