FOAF & DC

Dan Brickley has written the paper, FOAF and the draft DC Agents requirements, to investigate and assess feasibility of using Friend of a Friend for Dublin Core agent descriptions.

FOAF

I'm going to start experimenting more with Friend of a Friend (FOAF) metadata. Anyone currently using this? Anyone want to be my friend? (Sounds pathetic). Will I be the first librarian blogger with a FOAF file? I didn't notice any others in the 'blogs I read.

FOAF

The papers from the FOAF-Galway meeting in early September are available. This is a metadata schema I find facinating, it describes personal relationships. Human beings are great resources and describing a social network could provide a unique method to access that wisdom and knowledge.

Some of the papers are:

• Bootstrapping the FOAF-Web: An Experiment in Social Network Mining Peter Mika
• Descriptions of Social Relations Peter Mika, Aldo Gangemi
• FOAF-Realm - control your friends' access to resources Sebastian Ryszard Kruk
• Keyword Extraction from the Web for FOAF Metadata Junichiro Mori, Yutaka Matsuo, Mitsuru Ishizuka, Boi Faltings
• Linking Semantically-Enabled Online Community Sites Andreas Harth, John G. Breslin, Ina O'Murchu, Stefan Decker
• Using RDF + FOAF to create a local business review and search network Chris Schmidt
• Moleskiing: a Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender System Paolo Avesani, Paolo Massa, Roberto Tiella

vCard

Michael Fagan points to several tools for vCard metadata.

RDF Snob has vcard2foaf.pl that converts vCard files into FOAF files. Lots of e-mail programs (including Microsoft's Outlook Express) can exchange address book information in vCard format. This script lets you quickly convert that information into FOAF data.

He also has the script ldif2foaf.pl that converts LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) files into FOAF files. The mail programs included with the Netscape and Mozilla Web browsers both export address book data in LDIF.

The W3C has released the note Representing vCard Objects in RDF/XML

This note specifies a Resource Description Framework (RDF) encoding of the vCard profile defined by RFC 2426 and to provide equivalent functionality to its standard format. The motivation is to enable the common and consistent description of persons (using the existing semantics of vCard) and to encode these in RDF/XML.

And last, palmcluster.org has a program to turn vCard metadata into FOAF.

The program vcf2foaf is available in two formats. First, you can upload your vCard file or vCard address book using the form above and a FOAF file will be returned to your browser window. The content-type for the file will be "text/xml" rather than the more technically correct "application/rdf+xml". I did this so that most people can preview the results in their browser before saving. Second, you may download the Perl program itself and run it on your computer (or look at the source).

FOAF

FOAF : Using open standards to support community building by Brian Kelly appears in the latest issue of Ariadne. FOAF is an interesting concept and can provide one level of Web structure.

This article has sought to describe FOAF and outline its potential, in particular for use to support community building at events. At the presentation of the paper "Using FOAF to Support Community Building" at the IADIS Web-Based Collaboration conference in March 2004, I proposed that its future conferences should seek to encourage use of FOAF to support community building across delegates. This suggestion was accepted by the conference organisers and we will consider how to implement it.

Following this initial acceptance of FOAF's potential, participants at the annual Institutional Web Management Workshop event, (to be held at the University of Birmingham, 27-29 July 2004), will have an opportunity to use FOAF. A page providing information on how to get involved in the use of FOAF at the workshop has been created.

In the UK it is possible to receive FOAF metadata on ones' mobile phone via Plink. I personally feel the term "friend" is a bit vague and like the richer terms provided by XFN. Maybe this will change in time. Maybe some library conferences will experiment with using FOAF to connect like minded folks, it would only be an experiment at this stage.

FOAF

The RDFWeb and the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) project has a redesigned site. "FOAF is all about creating and using machine-readable homepages that describe people, the links between them and the things they create and do."

I'm curious, is anyone using this? Have you included a FOAF file on your site? I can't because Blogger does not allow other files. I could place it elsewhere, Geocities or Anglefire, for example. Mapping the friend links would be interesting. Who would list someone as a friend and then not have the other reciprocate? Who would be the most popular? Least? This would give another view of the Web.

FOAF

Parsing FOAF with PHP by Ian Davis is a short introduction to RDF (Resource Description Framework), specifically FOAF (Friend of A friend). FOAF could help establish communities of trust or at least, provide an alternative systems of links to navigate the Web. I'd like to create FOAF and OPML files for Catalogablog, but the server does not provide space for those. I suppose I could post them elsewhere and just point to them. Another task to add to the list.

FOAF

The newsreader NewsMonster has the ability to use Friend of a Friend data. It also provides for export to PDA's and reads all versions of RSS. Interesting, I'll have to download it and play with it a bit when I have some time.

As for FOAF, I think the idea has some potential uses. However, as I understand it, FOAF metadata should be stored as a separate file. I'd like the ability to place it in the HEAD section of a document, as well as pointing to another file.

Friend-of-a-Friend

A new application of RDF is to link people together, know as Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF). An introduction is Finding friends with XML and RDF

Explores an XML and RDF application known as Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF). FOAF allows the expression of personal information and relationships, and is a useful building block for creating information systems that support online communities. Code samples demonstrate the basics.

A tool for creating a FOAF file is the FOAF-a-matic

The FOAF-a-matic is being provided as a quick and easy way for you to create your own FOAF description. Simply work through the forms on this page and complete whichever entries you'd like to add to your description. At a minimum you'll need to supply your name and email address, and similarly for any friends you might add.

A technical description is FOAF: the 'friend of a friend' vocabulary

This is the FOAF namespace document. It describes the FOAF vocabulary, and the terms (RDF classes and properties) that constitute it. As such, it is a Semantic Web vocabulary or 'ontology'.

Interesting. Anyone using it?