Frantic Semantics: DOAP, FOAF, DOAC, SIOC and DC

This is the third and final post in a series on RDF and the Semantic Web. The first post is here and the second one here.

So far, we've looked at what RDF is for and how it works. In this post are details of some popular projects that use RDF.

FOAF

FOAF (standing for 'Friend of a Friend') is an RDF vocabulary that allows creators of RDF to describe themselves and the people they know. There are tags for providing your contact details - should you wish people to know them - expressing your interests, showing off your online accounts, establishing your social ties, recording your projects and even detailing where you work or go to school. FOAF is far and away the best supported and most developed-for RDF vocabulary for describing everything about you, so if nothing else it's the most sensible move.

DOAP

Description of a Project, or DOAP for short, is a method of describing projects, programmes and plans in RDF. It allows you to give some informational text on the project, specify its homepage and - where applicable - source code, and give credit where credit is due to those who develop and maintain it. It can also integrate seamlessly into FOAF, so you can show off all the wonderful things you work on within the comfort of your own profile document.

SIOC

The Semantically Interlinking Online Communities project, otherwise known as SIOC (pronounced 'shock'), is a project to establish a common RDF vocabulary for describing community sites such as blogs and forums that allows them to be linked together in new and exciting ways. Every Site can host several Forums, each of which can in turn contain a number of Posts written by various Users. Again, this vocabulary can be mixed with others such as FOAF to give additional information.

DOAC

DOAC stands for Description Of A Career, and is an RDF method of putting your CV online. It encompasses experience, education and language skills, and when combined with FOAF is compatible with Europass, an initiative by the European Commission to help EU citizens display their qualifications clearly and simply.

DC

The DC, or Dublin Core, is a vast collection of terms for providing general metadata about a resource. Alongside FOAF, it is one of the most popular RDF vocabularies around and covers just about everything relating to web resources you can think of. Extremely useful for large organisations with a lot of paperwork to deal with!

Further Reading:

• The RDF page at the W3C's site.
• The W3C's official RDF primer.