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.

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, Homepage, Weblog, ICQ/AIM/Jabber ID, Homepage of the company one works for, etc. 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, with more specific relationship definitions, tell the other which places in the world have you visited or statements about spoken, read and written languages of oneself.

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>

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See also

• Semantic Web
• XML
• Social network

External links

• The FOAF Project
• FOAF Specification
• RDFweb
• FOAFexplorer HTML based FOAF Browser
• Advanced FOAF Explorer another XHTML based FOAF Browser
• FOAFnaut SVG based FOAF Browser
• FoaFSpace FOAF search engine
• FOAF-a-matic Page to generate FOAF Descriptions
• Xhtml Friends Network is supposed to be an improved version of FOAF.