RDFWeb News Archive: Collected Snippets

Some excerpted mentions of FOAF collected below...

"I'm a little surprised the foaf vocabulary hasn't found itself in the press more often - it's a good route into RDF ideas, clear what's being said. "

"...Using Semantic Web tools like FOAF that connect people and their data, there's a good chance that your opinion will be discovered and listened to."

"RDF for mail filtering: FOAF whitelists - 12 Jul 2002 - What you do is generate a checksum based on your mailbox ID. Then you distribute that checksum, and people create "whitelists" (but let's call 'em goodlists, instead, okay, and get that color thing out of there, time for a little accuracy in our semantics) with your checksums - NOT your email address, that can't be guessed by looking at the checksum. And you add a list of your own addresses, see, everyone shares "good" email addresses in a big database and that way mail that comes from the peoples, the good peoples, can be flagged higher, and mail that comes from spam folks gets flagged lower. There you have it, a real application of the Semantic Web, although it doesn't fully exist yet, but yep."

June 27, 2002 :: FOAF as MftM (an alternate syntax)

"This week I've been joining Morbus Iff (who incidentally is now writing on my other blog,) in exploring the Friend of a Friend RDF vocabulary. It's a very neat way of describing yourself, your interests, details and friends. It is potentially very very powerful indeed. Just thought you might like advance warning. :-) For you RDF fans, here's my (potentially flawed) FOAF file."

Good grief. Anyway, this exploration is certainly opening more doors than it's closing. Actually, that's not quite right. It's showing me new doors that I choose to go through. This one had FOAF written on it in shiny brass letters.

FOAF is a project under the RDFWeb umbrella, and is an effort to build a vocabulary for expressing relationships between and facts about things on the interweb. As with REST, a key axiom (hrm, is that verging on the tautalogical?) is that URIs are very important, in uniquely identifying resources. There's a good introductory article by Edd Dumbill on FOAF.

I've had a first hash at a FOAF file to describe me, and it's here. In the growing fury of social network construction and subsequent mining, this could be interesting. Hey, and it doesn't have to stop there... Under the influence of a small tumbler of Glenmorangie, I can half-imagine a situation where we have compound business documents and partners in an ERP system like SAP's R/3 exposed and linked (through the philosophical transparency of REST) to one another via their URIs, with those link relationships described in a FOAFy (RDFlike?) way.

Hrmmmm...

From REST to URIs, the Semantic Web, RDF, and FOAF

But you don't have to just use RDF for Dublin Core metadata (page titles, subjects, creator data mainly). RDF is extensible in other ways too. Friend Of A Friend [or FOAF] is a way of fleshing out that URI we used earlier to identify a person. What's more, part of FOAF lets you specify who your friends are, and as part of that point to where their publicly accessible FOAF file is. These aren't hard to make -- in fact, here's a simple Javascript app to make your own file: FOAF-a-matic.

...we use Person class and associated properties from the Friend-of-a-Friend (foaf) ontology, to facilitate interoperability with other applications

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