FOAF
for Social Network
Portability
Uldis Bojars (captsolo@gmail.com)
WebCamp on Social Network Portability
Cork, Ireland - March 2, 2008

Introduction
Uldis Bojārs
@ DERI Galway
• FOAF - topic of this talk
• SIOC - what I am working on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

Friend of a Friend
Information about:
• Person
• Social Network / Relations
• Groups

Friend of a Friend
Information about:
• Person
• Social Network / Relations
• Groups (multiple)
• ... and more ...

Richer Info Needed?
• RDF allows us to combine FOAF
with other vocabularies
• XFN, Relations vocabulary, ...

Richer Info Needed?
• RDF allows us to combine FOAF
with other vocabularies
• XFN, Relations vocabulary, ...
RDF = Information, Concentrated

Richer Info Needed?
• An example - Morten’s FOAF profile:
http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/author/mortenf/

Social Network
Portability
Components (data):
• A way to identify a person (across sites)
- privacy
• A way to describe a social network
- relations between people

Identifying Properties
• E-Mail address (private)
• Hash of e-mail (semi-public)
• URLs (public)
• ...

Social Network
Portability
Components (tools):
• Tools / Services (do the actual “magic”)
• Data providers
- opening up social media sites
• Data users / consumers

Workflow
1. Parse FOAF data (from Site A)
2. Extract a list of friends and
some data for identifying them
3. Compare this identifying data with
a registry of users on Site B,
report matching users

Parsing FOAF data?
Python:
import RDF
# using Redland Python bindings (librdf.org)
m = RDF.Model()
m.load('http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf')

Finding Friends? :)
SPARQL:
SELECT ?person ?mbox
WHERE {
<danbri> foaf:knows ?person .
?person foaf:mbox ?mbox .
}

Case Study: LiveJournal
• Data about a person (FOAF) - ✓
• Social network (FOAF) - ✓
• Identifying information ...
Difficulty: this data (foaf:mbox_sha1sum)
is spread across friends’ profiles.
Must be collected together before use.

Distributed Social
Information
• What about using Flickr, Twitter, ... account
URLs as identifyers?
- Identifying properties are only useful if
other sites also knows this data
- Entering all the URLs again and again?!
• Describe these accounts once
- Applications can get this info from your
homepage (e.g., described in FOAF)

http://apassant.net/blog/2008/01/12/one-foaf-fits-all/

Open Questions
• Who owns this information?
• You should have ability to backup and
reuse your social network info
(you own the data!)
• Privacy
• ... ... ...

Thank you!
• http://wiki.foaf-project.org/FAQ
• http://captsolo.net/info
• #webcamp
(look for more info tagged “webcamp”)