I’ve been interested in the potential of RDF for adding “smarts” to the web for a long time. For the uninitiated, RDF is a very general way of making meta-data available to machines for automated processing. The way most people see the general value is when you point out how hard it can be to do a web search for “Java” (the island) when there is so much online information about “Java” (the programming language). If web documents had good metadata, you could tell your search engine that you wanted the island but not the programming language without having to add arbitrary words to your search phrase like “island” or “indonesia”.

Well, RDF is taking a while to catch on, mostly because of the chicken-and-egg problem of whether people want to spend time marking up their pages with RDF metadata when there aren’t many tools to make use of it yet. As I noted, the Creative Commons project provides an RDF form of their licenses. I’ve also been interested in a more ambitious project called PRISM which attempts to provide metadata standards for the Publishing industry.

Anyway, one other RDF vocabulary which has gotten some interest is FOAF. Perhaps this is because it provides a way for talking about yourself, a popular subject with many people. FOAF provides a simple way of organizing information about yourself and things you do. It also provides you with a way of indicating relationships between you and other people. In fact, some of the most interesting potentials of FOAF have to do with the idea of using your

A while ago, I had put together my own FOAF file using the FOAF-a-matic, but I had been reluctant to publish it because I felt like it wasn’t very interesting if it didn’t indicate some relationships, but none of my friends have set up FOAF files. Well, looking at some FOAF sites, it seems common to indicate a “knows” relationship with virtual strangers, so I decided to go ahead. First, I used the FOAF AutoCreation web site to “auto-discover” any available FOAF files for blogs to which I subscribe. Then I added Ian Davis, who made the cute little FOAF icon which now graces my home page. It seems like there should be some qualifiers for the “knows” relationship, like “subscribes to blog”, to clarify that I’ve never met Mark Pilgrim, Joe Gregorio, or Ben Hammersley. I’m sure that will evolve in time…