While doing preparation for some upcoming talks, I noticed that the FOAF specification had been updated to version 0.97 in January. It had been quite some time since there had been activity on this vocabulary so it is good to see some love shown to it. According to the specification, some of the new changes include:

• foaf:familyName is the new preferred term replacing foaf:family_name
• foaf:givenName is the new preferred term for foaf:givenname
• foaf:account is the new preferred term for foaf:holdAccount
• foaf:myersBriggs is now a datatypeProperty

Additionally, foaf:Agent is now owl:equivalentClass with dc:Agent and foaf:maker is now owl:equivalentClass with dc:creator. The older names above were marked as archaic.

Several people are starting to use other social networking sites as the basis for their FOAF profiles to avoid having to hand-maintain their connections.

semantictweet.com is a site that allows you to turn your Twitter account into a FOAF profile. For example, http://semantictweet.com/bsletten will generate a profile for my account in RDF/XML. To retrieve a subset of the information, you can use the following links:

• Just friends: http://semantictweet.com/bsletten/friends
• Just followers: http://semantictweet.com/bsletten/followers
• Friends and followers: http://semantictweet.com/bsletten/all
• Just you: http://semantictweet.com/bsletten/show

By adding the following to your site, you can make the information discoverable by software on the lookout for this kind of metadata:

<link rel=”meta” type=”application/rdf+xml” title=”FOAF” href=”http://semantictweet.com/bsletten“/>

Don’t forget to replace my account name with yours!