My FOAF network #1: the FOAFExplorer

In this series I will introduce the technologies behind my FOAF network. FOAF means Friend-of-a-Friend and

[t]he Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

My FOAF file (draft) will give you details on who I am, who I collaborate with (and other types of friends), which conferences I am attending, what I published etc. That is, I’ll try to keep it updated. BTW, FOAF is a RDF language.

FOAFExplorer

Pierre has done some excellent FOAF work in the past, and developed the MyFOAFExplorer, and also developed a tool to create a FOAF network based on the PubMed database, called SciFOAF. The latter is neat, but does not allow putting all this personal details in the FOAF files. However, the output could be a starting point.

Back to FOAFExplorer, this is what the FOAFExplorer shows for my network:

I’m a bit lonely, even though I have linked to two friends in my FOAF file, of which one has a FOAF file too (Henry):

<foaf:knows>
  <foaf:Person rdf:ID="HenryRzepa">
    <foaf:name>Henry Rzepa</foaf:name>
    <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/rzepa.xrdf"/>
  </foaf:Person>
</foaf:knows>
<foaf:knows>
  <foaf:Person rdf:ID="PeterMurrayRust">
    <foaf:name>Peter Murray-Rust
    <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>926d6f8ed367bdded26353a05e80b4f0ce18230d...
  </foaf:Person>
</foaf:knows>

I guess the FOAFExplorer does not browse into my network. More on that in later items in this series.