Dan Brickley: FOAF: the friend of a friend
vocabulary. I generated my FOAF profile using Leigh Dodd’s FOAF-a-matic (requires Javascript). The whole point of FOAF is to link to the FOAF files of your friends, but I don’t know which of my friends have FOAF files or where they are, so my profile currently makes me look like an antisocial sociopath (which is not far from the truth, but never mind that). It’s not entirely clear how one is supposed to find FOAF files, other than through other FOAF files. Aaron Swartz has previously recommended a FOAF-specific LINK tag, but I don’t know that anyone actually uses that (Aaron doesn’t at the moment).
I’m also not sure what this buys me, above and beyond public blogrolls. Except that it’s slightly more information and is in a more standard format. But people already use looser sources of information to build blogging ecosystems. What could we build if we all had FOAF files? I don’t know, but I’ll try anything once.
So anyway, I’ll be scrounging around for FOAF files today. If you have a FOAF file (or this post inspires you to make a FOAF file, using the FOAF-a-matic), please email me at f8dy@diveintomark.org so I can add you to my FOAF profile. Any friend of FOAF is a friend of mine.
Update: Phil Ringnalda has his FOAF file linked with the LINK tag that Aaron suggested a few months ago. But now I realize that I don’t know how to specify him as a friend. Hmm.
Update #2: DJ Adams taught me how to link, and gave me the URL of FOAF file (listed below). I’ve added him and a few other people to my FOAF profile. Michael McCracken wants to use FOAF in conjunction with Apple’s Rendezvous (auto-networking) technology in Mac OS X 10.2. And I found out what Ben Hammersley looks like. I’m adding some more data to mine, now that I have a few examples to work from.
Update #3: more FOAF files popping up everywhere.
I’m thinking of using foaf as the data type of a brainstorm i had a while back, to use Apple’s Rendezvous to find out about people around you.
I’m in.
It may or may not be useful beyond playing six degrees, but it is easy enough to generate.
If enough people deploy FOAF, there could be an opportunity to build some cool intertwingly RDF goodness out of it.
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