FOAF — in Search of a Simple Solution

FOAF is part of the Semantic Web. FOAF is an acronym for Friend of a Friend and it describes per­sons, their activ­i­ties and their rela­tion­ships to other peo­ple and objects. FOAF is described on Wikipedia here. There you will read about FOAF being a vocab­u­lary, or an ontol­ogy which might sound geeky and unin­ter­est­ing to the aver­age per­son. Even if you click on the word ontol­ogy you will get a def­i­n­i­tion that makes it seem like it would be of lit­tle inter­est to the non-technically ori­ented folks. All of this is some­what unfor­tu­nate because the use­ful­ness of this vocab­u­lary is to link peo­ple and to describe the rela­tion­ships between people.

Let me explain what I mean. I enjoy read­ing about the seman­tic web and web tech­nolo­gies. However, many of the peo­ple I know and con­sider friends prob­a­bly have very lit­tle inter­est in these very tech­ni­cal con­cepts. The web is fun, reaches many of peo­ple in many dif­fer­ent ways and pro­vides many things to many dif­fer­ent peo­ple. The way in which this hap­pens or is accom­plished is not known or even con­sid­ered by the aver­age per­son or user.  Continuing with what I was say­ing, many of the peo­ple I know and con­sider friends, are not going to care how the web is con­nect­ing them to infor­ma­tion, resources (what­ever that might be), or other peo­ple.  Unfortunately, so far, the imple­men­ta­tion of FOAF, where I’ve seen it, is very com­pli­cated. It has seemed to me that if it appears com­pli­cated to me, then it prob­a­bly remains unused by those peo­ple I know that are non-tech savvy.

The first chal­lenge is to con­vince the aver­age per­son as to why they should use FOAF, that is have a FOAF pro­file, or cre­ate and save a foaf (I will leave off the cap­i­tal­iza­tion of foaf from here on though in most places on the web it is spelled with all caps) file. To use foaf means to have a foaf file that exists some­where on the web, describes you, your rela­tion­ships and etc, and can be found by search engines. The issue of how this is done is the nature of the sec­ond chal­lenge. How does one come to have a foaf file on the web that search engines can find? These two chal­lenges go hand-in-hand.

My argu­ment is that for FOAF to work or be use­ful, it must be used by many peo­ple, regard­less of how tech savvy they are and it must be easy to use. Even as I write this, I find myself strug­gling to put this into sim­ple and clear terms. The foaf vocab­u­lary describes terms that can be used to describe a per­son, their rela­tion­ships and etc. This infor­ma­tion is stored in a file using these terms that make up the vocab­u­lary. Maybe it would be use­ful to think of this foaf file as being sim­i­lar to our pro­file, like we cre­ate on a social net­work­ing web­site. This anal­ogy would not work for my friends that do not use the social net­work­ing sites. Even those friends and acquain­tances of mine, do want to see their accom­plish­ments, their writ­ing, their ideas pub­lished and shared.

So, for FOAF to be effec­tive we need tools or inter­faces that are easy to use and that are widely avail­able. One exam­ple of a foaf cre­ator is here. It is called FOAF Creator and it reads “FOAF (Friend of a Friend) pro­files help peo­ple and machines find out more about you.” There are many other things that you might want to put in your foaf pro­file. Maybe you want to share your resume… or your accom­plish­ments… or maybe you want to share and man­age your own pro­file that you could use on var­i­ous social net­work­ing web­sites or you just want to have a way to tell peo­ple how to find you online… and how to be dis­cov­ered by long lost rel­a­tives and friends.

An ideal tool, would have these fea­tures that I was try­ing to describe above. The input forms would be clear as to what infor­ma­tion you would put into each field. The forms would be flex­i­ble and exten­sive, allow­ing for a wide range of infor­ma­tion to be saved and shared. Most impor­tantly, the appli­ca­tion or tool would save the infor­ma­tion into a file for you, in a folder that has your name.

The incen­tive for offer­ing free stor­age of other people’s foaf files is that foaf is only use­ful to each and every per­son if we can link to many and var­i­ous other per­sons. One of the most com­mon foaf terms is “knows.” This is a place to list the names of each per­son that you know. You would then list the loca­tion of that other person’s foaf file. So, again, it is good for me if the per­sons I know also have their own foaf file… that is they have cre­ated a foaf pro­file with infor­ma­tion which includes my name and a link to my foaf file.

My thoughts were that either Mediawiki, with the Semantic Mediawiki exten­sions, or Drupal could be excel­lent tools for accom­plish­ing these goals.

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