FOAF

FOAF stands for Friend-of-a-Friend - a project geared towards using RDF information storage to generate more coincidences in the world around us. As buzzword filled as that statement is, it's true: FOAF looks to attempt to draw people closer together by allowing them to find out information about each other. FOAF is an RDF schema which allows people to describe themselves and people they know in a variety of ways. There are a number of tools out there which can then take this information and aggregate it into different forms.

Newer materials - in Python.

• ppd.py - Search a FOAF document for a PPD, and return some basic properties for the foaf:Person. Fall back to the first person in the file if no foaf:PPD

One example of this is a small Perl script I've written, which will generate an address book with information about all the people who you list as people you know, by taking information from their FOAF files. Because FOAF allows you to describe your contact information, this type of information is easy to obtain. Downloads and information are available from the FOAF-fetch web page.

There is some other stuff I've done relating to FOAF. Specifically, I added FOAF support to LiveJournal, a project that has met with much popularity in the Semantic Web world. This put about 2.5 million more FOAF files on the web, although some of them are sorely underpopulated. This change made the entire way that FOAF is dealt with much different - no longer is a "complete" scutter of all FOAF data possible. ScutterStrategies mentions LiveJournal specifically as part of the reason for this. I think that that's a pretty nice endorsement of the size of the LiveJouranl addition to the Semantic Web world.

Some other minor things involving FOAF that are hosted here.:

• mailchecker - a proof of concept for the mbox-protector, this code loads an array created by the mbox protector, then compares the email address of a From: to that in the mbox protector.
• mbox protector - new work in progress for creating a list of addresses of people you know.
• #foaf FOAF file - A FOAF file describing the relationships between people in the #foaf IRC channel.
• Visual Relationship Representation - A visual representation of the relationships between people on the #foaf channel.
• Class specification - Example of a way to use a schema to describe academic classes, for use in data comparison for students to find shared classes. Incomplete.