SEMANTIC NUMBERS ON THE WEB

FOAF - The Friend-Of-A-Friend Project

FOAF is a Semantic Web project for machine-readable modelling of homepage-like content and social networks. FOAF relies on its specification which defines terms to be used in statements someone can make about someone else, such as name, gender and - most interesting - online attributes. To make linking between persons and describing social networks possible, one includes uniquely identifiable properties of ones friends, e.g. e-mail addresses, an ICQ ID, or a URL to the homepage or weblog of the person).

FOAF is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). It is designed to be easily extended, to allow data to be shared between varied computing environments. Other vocabularies' terms can easily be integrated in a FOAF document.

In order to make the FOAF document - typically named foaf.rdf - accessible by other applications it has to be published on the Internet. Similarly to Rich Site Summary (RSS), FOAF applications use Autodiscovery, embedding links to the FOAF document inside the web page.

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