Semantic Web: FOAF and other Vocabularies

FOAF is an acronym for Friend of a Friend. FOAF is a vocabulary for describing persons, their activities and their relationships to other people and objects. Or from the FOAF project we read:

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do; it is a contribution to the linked information system known as the Web. FOAF defines an open, decentralized technology for connecting social Web sites, and the people they describe.

FOAF is just one way of embedding information into a website or one could say it is only one type of information that one might want to include or know about a website, or one category of what is produced, consumed and distributed on the web. The web is about connections and it is very common for people to want to connect with one another.

Semantic Web Coding

This website will take advantage of RDFa, a W3C Recommendation for embedding semantic information inside web pages. This helps the search engines by giving them information about the meaning of what is contained on the web pages. In a larger sense, the semantic web allows computers, or software to understand the meaning of the content of what is on a web page and to store that information. By embedding semantic information into websites applications can use this information in various ways that were not possible previously.

In the past, information out on the web was very isolated and separate. There was no easy way to combine the data and build a large distributed database. That is the goal for many engineers of the web, including the founder Tim Berners Lee.

Let's start with my contact information, my electronic business card, which is here.

My FOAF file, Bruce Whealton's FOAF file which describes my activies, accounts, contact information and who I know, on the web is here.

Bruce Whealton Sr. (1940-) is my father and so is appropriate to link to him in this demonstration. His contact card, his virtual card, is here.

Bruce Whealton Sr.'s FOAF file is here.