Dan Brickley is explaining Friend of a Friend. (I had a chance to talk with him about this yesterday in a hallway.) It’s an XML standard that allows people to express information about themselves…the sorts of things you might say on your homepage. There are currently 2M FOAF descriptions in the world.

There are different styles of FOAF files. You can be very explicit about relationships: “Jane is my arch nemesis.” But there’s also a more implicit, evidence-based approach: Libby and I went to the same school and work for the same organization. (“I lean toward this one,” says Dan.)

Here’s a paragraph from the official FOAF FAQ:

FOAF provides conventions for saying the sorts of things that you might say in your homepage (‘My name is…’, ‘I work for …’, ‘I’m interested in …’, ‘I live near …’, ‘I’m pictured in these photos…’, ‘I write in this weblog…’), but in a way that is easy for computers to process. Since computers are pretty dumb, and can’t read human languages, we provide simplistic FOAF descriptions, to help them answer questions such as ‘Show me pictures of Weblog authors interested in … who live near here’, ‘Show me recent articles written by people at this meeting’, ‘Is this person vegetarian?’. FOAF is a ‘Semantic Web’ project, which is an effort to make the Web easier for machines to help us navigate.

As Dan said recently on his blog: “A purpose of FOAF is to engineer more coincidences in the world.”

“We’re on the border of going mainstream.” The social, legal and pricacy issues need serious attention, says Dan.

Now Edd Dumbill is talking about FoafBot. I had trouble hearing him because I’m in the back, but apparently it provides IRC channels with information gained by spidering FOAF files. Cool.

Categories: Uncategorized dw