FOAF is DOA?

Pieter Overbeeke, founder of OPML host OPMLmanager, thinks the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is dying a slow death but wonders if OPML could come to the rescue -

You could display your personal information in outlines and link to the foaf-opml files of your friends with opml-inclusions. Using an opml browser (i.e. grazr) you could easily browse from your own friends to your friends-friends to your friends-friends-friends etc. (you should stumble on yourself in 10 hops i think.

So I've added his OPML to my list of Grazer Blades in the sidebar. Let's see where this goes. If anybody wants to add mine here's the link :)

Comments

[Danny]

[I'll post this over at Pieter's too, save typing ;-)]

FOAF's not been very visible of late, but it's hardly "dying a slow death". Having a slow birth might be more accurate ;-)

A lot has been achieved though - the problem of how to identify/describe people on the Web is not trivial. But the FOAF vocabulary is extremely useful - it's the first thing to reach for if you're looking to describe people, even if you do want to serialise this stuff in OPML, it could help avoid some of the traps in modelling people.

There's a *huge* amount of FOAF data out there - quite a few systems (like LiveJournal) create FOAF files for every user, things like WordPress support XFN which can be read as FOAF (via GRDDL).

FOAF data is structured personal information, but you must remember that FOAF itself is just one RDF vocabulary. The power comes from that common framework. Being able to use different vocabularies together, you can make inferences and query across the whole lot in a consistent fashion.

A good example of this just appeared in the form of the SPARQL Calendar demo, see:
http://torrez.us/archives/2006/03/29/428/

It reads FOAF files and looks for matches between people's interests and travel schedules. FOAF is used to identify people and their projects, the calendar data comes from the iCalendar vocabulary, with instance data being translated from .ics and hCalendar microformats.