最近研究本体Ontology，因为涉及到人的描述，所以对比较流行的Foaf做了一些调研。

FOAF (Friend of a Friend) Overview

 Website: http://www.foaf-project.org/

 FOAF is a way to describe people and relationships to computers. FOAF stands for Friend Of A Friend. Technically, it is an RDF/XML Semantic Web vocabulary. Because of this, FOAF data is easy to process and merge.

 FOAF用机器可理解的方式来描述人员以及人们之间的联系，它基于RDF和XML等语义网技术，所以易于理解和处理。这种想法和Social Network以及六度空间的理论相近。

 当前比较火的“朋友圈子”网站有：

• Google ORKUT: http://www.orkut.com
• Microsoft Wallop: http://mywallop.com/

 人们用来FOAF文件来结交朋友，组建兴趣圈，查询资料，甚至约会。在FOAF中个人的Email地址是被hash的，所以可以减少Spam的可能性。人们可以利用现成的工具来创建自己的FOAF文件，用来说明自己是谁，住在哪里，喜欢做什么事情，为谁工作等等等等。然后将相应的FOAF文件上传到Internet上就可以了。

 FOAF基于RDF描述，用自动发现的机制彼此连接。当你更新你的FOAF文件后，只需要将它重新放到网上，不用做更多的动作。

 注意，FOAF即不是开源项目，也没有存储用户的信息：

FOAF isn't a software package. FOAF isn't a user database or Web site either. You own your own content; FOAF just gives you some terminology and structure to make it easy to share that content however you see fit.

 FOAF文件和vCard文件的设计初衷不同，FOAF内容更多地强调个人的兴趣，希望更好的为Semantic Web服务，而vCard属于更为传统的商务个人信息描述。他们之间的转换目前可以通过jabfoaf (http://dougal.gunters.org/jabfoaf/ )和foaf2vCard (http://jibbering.com/2002/9/foaf-vcard.html )来完成。

 几个有关FOAF的词汇(Vocabulary)：

• Smushing:   

an informal term for 'merging data based on knowledge of uniquely identifying properties'. 把那些表示同一个属性的数据聚合起来。

• Scutter

In the context of RDFWeb and FOAF, a scutter is simply a computer program that loads, parses, interprets and acts upon the contents of a Web of interconnected RDF/XML documents. In this sense it is just a Semantic Web variant on the old theme of distributed Web indexing, sometimes called a 'harvester', 'spider', or 'robot'. The links between RDF documents are usually, but not necessarily, expressed using RDF's 'rdfs:seeAlso' property.

• Slashdot/SlashCode

Slash (a backronym for Slashdot Like Automated Story-telling Homepage) is the open source collection of Perl scripts which runs Slashdot, one of the oldest and most popular collaborative weblogs around. Slash was originally written by Rob Malda, and is now maintained by Jamie McCarthy and Chris Nandor, among others. The package is often incorrectly called Slashcode, which is the name of the website and SourceForge project.

• Advogato

Advogato is an online community site dedicated to free software development, created by Raph Levien. It describes itself as "the free software developer's advocate."