Lost Boy

Get Your FOAF On

This is the first in a series of short articles showcasing some of the capabilities of the FOAF and related vocabularies.

The intention is to provide enough detail to show the expressive power of the existing properties and how they can be usefully mixed with other vocabularies. However I want to keep these examples simple enough that people can use them as a template for hand-crafting their own FOAF files.

I'm assuming that you already have a basic FOAF document describing yourself and your friends. To meet this criteria you can just use the online FOAF-a-Matic which is available in ten languages.

I've also recently published an Introduction to FOAF tutorial on XML.com which you might also find interesting. It covers the basic FOAF properties and introducing concepts such as "smushing" and "Inverse Functional Properties" which I'll refer to occasionally in this series.

From that starting point I'm going to cover the usage of the following topics, starting with some areas which I personally don't think have had enough of an airing. This means that in some places we'll bump up against open issues and areas that need further clarification. I consider this a good thing.

Here's the current list of topics:

1. Projects
2. Events
3. Events continued: Conferences, Births, Deaths, and Marriages
4. Groups
5. Documents
6. Images
7. Geography

If you've got suggestions for other topics worth covering then let me know.