Building Social Networks: FOAF and XFN...
XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) are social networking protocols intended to identify links and relationships between people in a machine readable way.
This comparison of XFN and FOAF (on the XFN site, so maybe there's just a teensy weensy bit of bias, even if it is written by Eric A. Meyer) suggests that XFN offers a far more lightweght approach to the RDF overkill of FOAF. That's not necessaily a good thing, though, as some bloggers have a real problem with it: What does XFN to offer, then, exactly?). For the most considered view I have founfd to date, there's this response to Meyers comparison. However, having only just come across both of these schemes, I shall refrain from judgment until I've had a chance to play with both of them...
On the face of it, though, FOAF seems a better bet. And if there are occasionally useful XFN links out there, the something like this XSLT XHTML/XFN2RDF/FOAF converter seems sensible...
This comparison of XFN and FOAF (on the XFN site, so maybe there's just a teensy weensy bit of bias, even if it is written by Eric A. Meyer) suggests that XFN offers a far more lightweght approach to the RDF overkill of FOAF. That's not necessaily a good thing, though, as some bloggers have a real problem with it: What does XFN to offer, then, exactly?). For the most considered view I have founfd to date, there's this response to Meyers comparison. However, having only just come across both of these schemes, I shall refrain from judgment until I've had a chance to play with both of them...
On the face of it, though, FOAF seems a better bet. And if there are occasionally useful XFN links out there, the something like this XSLT XHTML/XFN2RDF/FOAF converter seems sensible...
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