Thanks to the help of Henry Story, who recently presented the concepts of FOAF (an acronym of Friend of a friend) in a Sun Identity Interest teleconference forum, I have begun to experiment a bit with the technology.

According to the FOAF Wikipedia article:

FOAF is a descriptive vocabulary expressed using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Computers may use these FOAF profiles to find, for example, all people living in Europe, or to list all people both you and a friend of yours know. This is accomplished by defining relationships between people. Each profile has a unique identifier (such as the person’s e-mail addresses, a Jabber ID, or a URI of the homepage or weblog of the person), which is used when defining these relationships.

The FOAF project, which defines and extends the vocabulary of a FOAF profile, was started in 2000 by Libby Miller and Dan Brickley. It can be considered the first Social Semantic Web application, in that it combines RDF technology with ‘Social Web’ concerns.

The FOAF project provides a way for me to maintain my personal Identity profile and link to others I know, creating a global social graph of acquainted people.  I don’t know much yet, but am intrigued by its possibilities.

You can visit my FOAF Card by clicking here, or view the XML for the corresponding FOAF file by clicking here.

If you have a FOAF file and would like to be added to my “knows” list, please send my the URL for your FOAF file.

Thanks!  I’ll keep you updated on my progress.