FOAF
Comments: 3
Got a FOAF file? Mine’s here. You can generate one FOAF-a-matically thanks to Leigh Dodds:
FOAF-a-matic – Describe yourself in RDF
FOAF-a-matic is a simple Javascript application which allows you to create a FOAF (“Friend-of-A-Friend”) description of yourself. You can read more about FOAF in Edd Dumbill’s “XML Watch: Finding friends with XML and RDF” article, at the FOAF homepage on RDFWeb, and also the FOAF vocabulary description.
In short though, FOAF is a way to describe yourself – your name, email address, and who you’re friends with – using XML and RDF. This allows software to process these descriptions, perhaps as part of an automated search engine, to discover information about your and the communities of which you’re a member. FOAF has the potential to drive many new interesting developments in online communities. In this way it’s closely related to RSS, and ‘blogrolls’ on weblogs: exposing data in a machine-processable format enables a wide variety of applications to be constructed with some very interesting results.
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Posted to Computers • 2002.09.23 (Mon) • 22:14
Comments
Posted by victor 2002.12.16, 20:37
What’s the etiquette about including someone in your FOAF list? I had published my FOAF file on my site, but since I don’t really get to meet the people whose blogs I read, and the people who I know do not write blogs (and thus, don’t have FOAF files) the foafnaut (http://jibbering.com/foaf/) search for my info wasn’t that interesting. I decided to include the people whose blogs I read (even when of course, they aren’t close friends), and now the foafnaut display looks interesting, but often I find I don’t have the right SHA1 hashes for some people .For example, Jeremy, I had included you with the address you publish in this site, only to find, after expanding Ben Hammersley’s entry that you appear with other email. It’s after finding that you had your own FOAF file (and seeing it not linked with a LINK tag) that I did a search for FOAF and found this entry (and will therefore update my file with the correct SHA1 sum)
Of course, I don’t want to pretend that I’m close friends with all the people I list, only that I know about and often read their blogs. I wouldn’t like to annoy someone by including him/her in my list, that’s why I ask if there’s such a thing as an approved netiquette aproach to including someone.
Posted by jh 2002.12.22, 23:44
Victor — You busted me! To be honest, I lost interest in FOAF after ‘experimenting’ with the file I mentioned above. I ran into exactly the same issues you mention in your comment and finally thought what’s the point?
No one else I know (as in ‘real-life’ know, not weblog-reading know) has a FOAF file so the whole etiquette thing sort of stymied it for me.
You ask a good question — one that prompts me to clean up my act here and try to do this properly (and, yes, figure out the etiquette).
Posted by victor 2003.01.11, 18:05
Well since I linked to yours you may link to mine as well, I won’t mind a little bit of publicity :-) Perhaps, what I should do is post in my blog about my FOAF file, no one knows I have published it already.
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