Friend of a Friend
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FOAF is an initialism standing for Friend of a Friend used in some social sciences as a half-joking shorthand for the fact that much of the information on which people act comes from distant sources (as in "It happened to a friend of a friend of mine") and cannot be confirmed. It is probably best known from urban legend studies; some say the term was coined by Jan Harold Brunvand, the major popularizer of that field.
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Software usage
FOAF is also a project for machine-readable modelling of social networks founded by Libby Miller and Dan Brickley. The heart of the project is its specification which defines what statements you can make about someone, such as name, gender and various online attributes. To make linking possible, one includes uniquely identifiable properties of ones friends (such as SHA1 checksums of their E-Mail addresses, a Jabber ID, or a URI to the homepage or weblog of the person).
It is based on RDF, defined using OWL and can be easily extended, as example.
Example
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#">
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Jimmy Wales</foaf:name>
<foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:jwales@bomis.com" />
<foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.jimmywales.com/" />
<foaf:nick>Jimbo</foaf:nick>
<foaf:depiction rdf:resource="http://www.jimmywales.com/aus_img_small.jpg" />
<foaf:interest>
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.wikimedia.org" rdfs:label="Wikipedia" />
</foaf:interest>
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Angela Beesley</foaf:name> <!-- Wikimedia Board of Trustees -->
</foaf:Person>
</foaf:knows>
</foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>
Live forums
- Chat (irc://irc.freenode.net/foaf) with experts on FOAF
See also
- Dhúirt bean liom gur dhúirt bean leí -- a woman told me that a woman told her that...
- Semantic Web
- Social network
- XML
- XHTML Friends Network
External links
- The FOAF Project (http://www.foaf-project.org/)
- FOAF Specification (http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/)
- RDFweb (http://rdfweb.org/) hosts the FOAF wiki (http://rdfweb.org/topic/)
- FOAFexplorer (http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/) HTML based FOAF Browser
- Advanced FOAF Explorer (http://foaf-explorer.zapisky.info/) another XHTML based FOAF Browser
- FOAFnaut (http://FOAFnaut.org/) SVG based FOAF Browser
- FoaFSpace (http://www.foafspace.com/) FOAF search engine
- FOAF-a-matic (http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.html) Page to generate FOAF Descriptions
- XHTML Friends Network (http://gmpg.org/xfn/) is supposed to be an improved version of FOAF.de:FOAF