FOAF

The Friend of a Friend project, or FOAF, is an open-source social networking standard for describing friend relationships in a social graph. The descriptions are machine readable and can be used to link data from all over the web. Tools like FOAF-O-MATIC allow even novice users to create an XML file of RDF triples and publish it to the web. FOAF is also supported by popular CMS tools such as Drupal

FOAF was one of the first projects to demonstrate linked data or the Semantic Web. FOAF is an Ontology that describes people and relationships. The ontology can be used in HTML with RDFa or in an XML file using RDF. This enables each individual on the web to create and maintain their own personal data and relationships and publish them to the web using a Universal Resource IdentifierURI. This data can in turn be used by anyone application on the web using the FOAF ontology and user specific URI. RDF creates a software readable file, while RDFa allows data to be both displayed and tagged for machine readability.

• Microformats

• RDF

• RDFa

• Semantic Web

• Tim Berners-Lee