FOAF

FOAF (from "friend of a friend") is an RDF based schema to describe persons and their social network in a semantic way. FOAF could get used within many wikis for annotating user pages, or describing articles about people. In Semantic MediaWiki, FOAF annotations can be used as imported vocabulary. A list of currently available FOAF elements is given below.

Using FOAF on
Using Semantic MediaWiki's feature of importing vocabularies from external ontologies, a number of FOAF properties have been imported into this wiki. Since semanticweb.org is a wiki for the Semantic Web research community, we partially use the common foaf abbreviations for the imported elements. This is also useful since some elements of FOAF have a specific meaning. For example, foaf:knows can only be used between two persons. So if one would represent it by an attribute "knows", it might be used wrongly in contexts such as "Denny knows Karlsruhe" where the object is not a person.

In other contexts, one might also use less technical labels within the wiki (especially, if the wiki is not in English).

The following is a list of currently available elements:


 * Category:Person (representing Foaf:Person)
 * Category:Organization (representing Foaf:Organization)
 * Property:Foaf:knows
 * Property:Foaf:member
 * Property:Name (representing Foaf:name)
 * Property:Homepage (representing Foaf:homepage; Template:Homepage is probably even more convenient)
 * Property:Foaf:mbox (Template:Mailbox includes Foaf:mbox; don't bother using mbox directly)
 * Property:Foaf:mbox_sha1sum
 * Property:Foaf:depiction
 * Property:Foaf:phone

For example, one could write

name::John Doe has the homepage foaf:homepage::http://johndoe.org. His best friend is foaf:knows::Jane Doe.

to get the following statements in the exported RDF:

John Doe   

This wiki also defines properties corresponding to several other FOAF elements such as Property:Foaf:firstName, but they are not associated with the FOAF vocabulary when exported as RDF.

Linking external FOAF files
If you already have a FOAF file, you will want to connect it with your article within this wiki. This is indeed very simple: just write

see also::http://the.location.of/your/FOAF/file

on your page to include an rdfs:seeAlso pointer. An even easier way to link a single FOAF file is to use the parameter "FOAF" of the template Template:Person which is very handy for building personal pages anyway.