FOAF network

FOAF or Friend Of A Friend is a project for machine-readable modelling of homepage-like profiles and social networks, basically a schema for defining relationships between people, and various attributes such as name, gender, and interests. FOAF is based on RDF (Resource Description Framework). The FOAF RDF is often rendered in XML but FOAF is not XML, it is not a schema based on XML, it is based on RDF. This means for instance that XML should not be generated directly and, more importantly, a FOAF parser should not interpret XML directly but instead "understand" the RDF model. If you just want a simple format for exchanging data between applications, then FOAF is probably an overkill, it is more sage to define a simple ad hoc XML format.

See also the article on Wikipedia.

FOAF networks

 * foafPub dataset by Li Ding, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi, and Lina Zhou Date on February 23, 2005