FOAF is widely used on the Web to describe people, groups and organizations and their properties. Since FOAF does not require unique IDs, it is often unclear when two FOAF instances are co-referent, i.e., denote the same entity in the world. We describe a prototype system that identifies sets of co-referent FOAF instances using logical constraints (e.g., IFPs), strong heuristics (e.g., FOAF age...

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) ontology is a vocabulary for mapping social networks. In this paper we propose an extension to FOAF in order to allow it to model learners and their social networks. We analyse FOAF alongside different learner modeling standards and specifications, and based on this analysis we introduce a taxonomy of the different features found in those models. We then compare th...

The FOAF project has prominent importance for capturing human relations in Linked Data. We analyze the FOAF data structures and their extensions from the point of view of formal ontology and discuss problems inherent in its design. We also point out necessary considerations for transforming the FOAF data structures by supplying additional knowledge into them, while achieving/maintaining semanti...

Web-based collaboration (eCollaboration) is becoming increasingly popular. The crucial first step of a consulting collaboration is expert finding. This paper describes the FindXpRT project for finding experts via rules and taxonomies. We implemented rules for a client finding an expert to collaborate with, for an expert’s decision making on whether to collaborate, and for specifying the collabo...

As one emerging metadata standard for the Semantic Web, FOAF defines an RDF vocabulary for expressing metadata about people and the relation among them. This paper proposes a novel keyword extraction method to extract FOAF metadata from the Web. The proposed method is based on co-occurrence information of words. Our method extracts relevant keywords depending on the context of a person. Our exp...

The past year has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of social information published in RDF documents. Our investigations [1, 2] show that the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) ontology [3] is among the most used semantic web ontologies. This is true if we measure the number of semantic web documents (SWDs) that use the FOAF namespace, as Table I shows, or the number of triples using FOAF terms. Th...

Personalization mechanisms on the web today are clumsy and obtrusive, because users need to log in to multiple websites and enter their personal information and preferences separately for each. In addition, the user profile is different for each website and cannot be combined with other information on the web. Using Semantic Web technologies, in particular FOAF, we can identify the person brows...

The friend of a friend (FOAF) vocabulary is widely used on the Web to describe individual people and their properties. Since FOAF does not require a unique ID for a person, it is not clear when two FOAF agents should be linked as coreferent, i.e., denote the same person in the world. One approach is to use the presence of inverse functional properties (e.g., foaf:mbox) as evidence that two indi...

In this position paper, we introduce a potential problem that arises with the emergence of publicly-available, FOAF-based linked data. The problem allows a spammer to send context-aware spam, which has a high clickthrough rate. Unlike online profiles within social networks, FOAF-based structured data provides a more reliable and accessible “food” for spammers and attackers. Current solutions (e...

The friend of a friend (FOAF) vocabulary is widely used on the Web to describe ’agents’ (people, groups and organizations) and their properties. Since FOAF does not require unique ID for agents, it is not clear when two FOAF instances should be linked as co-referent, i.e., denote the same entity in the world. One approach is to use logical constraints such as the presence of inverse functional ...