From FOAF

Contents 1 Describing A Person Using FOAF 1.1 Example 1 1.2 Commentary 1.3 Example 2

[edit] Describing A Person Using FOAF

Having created a MinimalFoafDocument you'll naturally want to add further information that describes yourself further. Or perhaps you're UsingFoafKnows and want to add information about your friend?

Here's a list of the commonly used descriptive properties

* foaf:name -- the (complete) name of the Person
* foaf:title -- the title of the Person, e.g. Mr, Mrs, Dr, etc
* foaf:firstName -- the persons "first name"
* foaf:surname -- the persons surname or family name
* foaf:nick -- the persons nick name
* foaf:schoolHomepage -- the home page of the persons school
* foaf:workplaceHomepage -- the home page of the persons place of work
* foaf:workInfoHomepage -- a page describing what the person does at their place of work
* foaf:myersBriggs -- a Myers-Briggs classification of the person
* foaf:phone -- the persons phone number, specified as a fully qualified international phone number, using the tel: URL scheme
* foaf:homepage -- the persons homepage, see also Using foaf:weblog in your FOAF file
* foaf:weblog -- the persons weblog

[edit] Example 1

See MinimalFoafDocument for the document skeleton that wraps this fragment:

<foaf:Person>
   <foaf:name>David Banner</foaf:name>
   <foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title>
   <foaf:firstName>David</foaf:firstName>
   <foaf:surname>Banner</foaf:surname>
   <foaf:nick>hulk</foaf:nick>
   <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.davidbanner.com"/>
   <foaf:weblog rdf:resource="http://www.davidbanner.com/blog"/>
   <foaf:schoolHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.mit.edu"/>
   <foaf:workplaceHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.gamma-rays-r-us.com"/>
   <foaf:workInfoHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.gamma-rays-r-us.com/~banner/crazy-experiments.html"/>
   <!-- etc -->
</foaf:Person>

[edit] Commentary

This might look more complex, but is very simple in structure. Take care to notice that there are only two kinds of things going on inside the foaf:Person element.

Each sub-element in the XML is, following RDF's striped syntax, a relationship-encoding element. It encodes a relationship between the Person and either something named by URI, or some literal value written as a textual string.

In the markup below, we see:

  * things named by URI: foaf:homepage, foaf:mbox, foaf:schoolHomepage, rdfs:seeAlso
  * things provided as chunks of text: foaf:myersBriggs, foaf:mbox_sha1sum, 

The former all use rdf:resource= attributes on the appropriate relationship-encoding XML elements. The latter all provide their values within the enclosing relationship-encoding XML elements.

Note: all the complexity associated with writing RDF/XML comes from generalising this basic structure, to allow for:

  * crossreferences to things described elsewhere in the XML element tree (rdf:about/resource/nodeID)
  * nested RDF descriptions, replacing the self-closing relationship-encoding elements that carry rdf:resource= with elements whose nested contents are basically more of the (potentially nested) same.

[edit] Example 2

<foaf:Person>
  <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://rdfweb.org/people/danbri/"/>
  <foaf:depiction rdf:resource="http://rdfweb.org/people/danbri/mugshot/danbri-small.jpeg"/>
  <foaf:myersBriggs>INTP</foaf:myersBriggs>
  <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:danbri@rdfweb.org"/>
  <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:danbri@w3.org"/>
  <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:daniel.brickley@bristol.ac.uk"/>
  <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>748934f32135cfcf6f8c06e253c53442721e15e7</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
  <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>362ce75324396f0aa2d3e5f1246f40bf3bb44401</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
  <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>f46850eab07e26c850847d88390530afcfee0711</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
  <foaf:workplaceHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/People/DanBri/"/>
  <foaf:schoolHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.westergate.w-sussex.sch.uk/"/>
  <foaf:schoolHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.bris.ac.uk/"/>
  <foaf:schoolHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.chichester.ac.uk/"/>
  <foaf:schoolHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.southdowns.ac.uk/"/>
  <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://rdfweb.org/people/danbri/rdfweb/danbri-foaf.rdf"/>
</foaf:Person>
<!-- there is a Person (un-named) with a homepage whose URI name is ...
  and that is represented in the image ... and has a myers briggs classification of
  ... and several mailboxes identified by URI... and by sha1 hash'ed URI ...
  and that has a workplace homepage of ... and whose schooling included
  4 organisations whose homepages are ... and who is further described in danbri-foaf.rdf -->
</foaf:Person>

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