#39 FOAF / RDF summary of user profiles & contacts

[Dan]

FOAF is an RDF vocabulary for describing who you are
and who you know in a machine readable format.

http://www.foaf-project.org/

There's about 33,000 FOAF using individuals in the wild,
according to http://www.plink.org/, with major sites like
LiveJournal providing support for it.

RDF is a web standard, FOAF is developed by Dan Brickley
and Libby Miller, both of the w3c.

There are extension vocabularies for indicating who is
who - ie colleagues, friends, workmates, and this is all
part of a wider effort to develop the Semantic Web.

The user profiles/contacts interface could produce RDF
quite easily.

The benefit of doing this is twofold:
1) People can use the foaf from your project to describe
themselves elsewhere on the web.
2) Coupled with a system like myUID (http://www.myuid.
com/) FOAF allows you to transport user accounts
between systems - one login, one profile, no filling out
stupid forms. This would allow developers of other
projects to wander in, like it was a wiki, be assigned a
guest account, and participate in a project.

Existing software is readily available:
PEAR packages:
* XML_FOAF
* XML_Tree
Other:
* RAP (RDF API for PHP)

[Andrew Simpson]

Logged In: YES
user_id=523452

Looks like an interesting project, but I'm not yet convinced
how relevant it is to WebCollab yet.
I'll keep a watching brief on it.