FoaF Explorer

What is FoaF?

FoaF is an acronym for Friend of a Friend, an experimental project and vocabulary for the Semantic Web.

It is based on the idea of a machine-readable version of the current World Wide Web, with homepages, mailling lists, travel itineraries, calendars, address books and the likes.

The FoaF vocabulary is most often used in RDF/XML files describing a person, usually augmented with other vocabularies such as Web of Trust, Speaks, Reads and Writes and WGS84 Geo Positioning - try Leigh Dodds's Foaf-a-Matic and create your own FoaF description!

What is the FoaF Explorer?

Even though FoaF and the Semantic Web is designed for machines, it can sometimes be interesting to browse the virtual neighbourhoods of friends in much the same way the "regular" web is browsed.

The FoaF Explorer tries to present the information and assertions in a human-readable format, currently by way of direct transformations of the raw RDF/XML to XHTML with XSLT (see disclaimer below).

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Privacy Policy

The FoaF Explorer is a contribution to the FoaF Project and part of the Semantic Web effort to make RDF available on the Web.

As such, the FoaF URIs used with the FoaF Explorer are recorded (through the server access logs), and made available to any other interested parties through the scutter plan. Should you wish to have your URI excluded from this list, just send an e-mail, and it will be removed promptly.

Other such files can be found on the FoaF Wiki's DataSources page.

Linking to the FoaF Explorer

The recommended way of linking to the Foaf Explorer is by means of the large logo above or one of the following icons (SVG Source):

Please place a copy of the icon you choose on your own server, don't link directly to these.

foaf-explorer.12.png (12x12 PNG)
foaf-explorer.16.png (16x16 PNG)
foaf-explorer.24.png (24x24 PNG)
foaf-explorer.32.png (32x32 PNG)

Bookmarklet

[FoaF Explorer] Leigh Dodds has created a bookmarklet that takes you to the FoaF Explorer when invoked on a page that contains a link for FoaF Autodiscovery. A modified version (should be somewhat more portable and/or standards compliant) is linked below.

Drag this to your toolbar: FoaF Explorer

Now, whenever you see a page with the FoaF icon , chances are you can simply invoke the bookmarklet, and you'll be shown the FoaF Explorer rendering of the person's or organization's FoaF file.

Disclaimer

The FoaF Explorer is based on the Raptor (Redland) RDF parser, but contains some legacy XSLT that doesn't handle all cases.

Because of this, the FoaF Explorer may not show the intended meaning of certain FoaF files, and should not be considered a validator, use the W3C RDF Validator (for basic syntax) or Rosco (for schema validation) instead.

In particular, the following syntax concepts are only partially supported: