Lost Boy

Got Advogato? Get FOAF!

Continuing a week spent tinkering with FOAF utilities, I've just posted a new one that will automatically generate a basic FOAF file for you if you have an existing Advogato profile.

Advogato to FOAF

To use the utility all you need to supply is your nick name and email address. The latter is used as a unique identifier in the FOAF universe, so including that in the FOAF document makes it easier for FOAF applications to combine different peoples statements about you. There's an option (the default actually) to encrypt this as a SHA1 sum so it won't be revealed to spammers.

The utility uses Javascript to validate the form and assemble a URL chain that consists of using the W3C HTML Tidy service to turn your Advogato profile page into XHTML, and then the W3C XSLT service to process the results with this stylesheet which scrapes the relevant data from the page.

Here's some sample output from my profile.

There are two obvious extensions to this. The first is to provide an option for automatically generating foaf:knows statements for all the people you've certified (this assumes that FOAF apps are able to smush based on foaf:homepage alone. The second is to include your (and your friends) Advogato certification level as an additional property. Bill Kearney has sketched out a schema for this already.

Thanks to Morten Frederiksen for helping to make sure that the RDF output validates.

Between this and the FOAF-a-Matic you've no longer got an excuse for not having a FOAF description of yourself. Every blog should have one!