what's foaf?

Answer 1

FOAF (an acronym of Friend of a Friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself.

FOAF is an extension to RDF and is defined using OWL. Computers may use these FOAF profiles to find, for example, all people living in Europe, or to list all people both you and a friend of you know. This is accomplished by defining relationships between people. Each profile has a unique identifier (such as the person's e-mail addresses, a Jabber ID, or a URI of the homepage or weblog of the person), which is used when defining these relationships.

The FOAF project, which defines and extends the vocabulary of a FOAF profile, was started in 2000 by Libby Miller and Dan Brickley.

Friend of a friend (FOAF) is also a phrase used to refer to someone that one does not know well — literally, a friend of a friend.

In some social sciences, the phrase is used as a half-joking shorthand for the fact that much of the information on which people act comes from distant sources (as in "It happened to a friend of a friend of mine") and cannot be confirmed. It is probably best known from urban legend studies. The term was popularized by Jan Harold Brunvand, the best-known writer of that field. It was apparently first published by Rodney Dale in his 1978 book The Tumour in the Whale - WH Allen ISBN 0-426-18710-5, in which he discussed the "FOAFtale".

The rise of social network services has led to increased use of this term.

"Friend of a Friend Films" is also the name of a production company based in Los Angeles and "Friend of a Friend" is a song by the Foo Fighters.

Answer 2

FOAF means friend of a friend