FOAF (Friend-of-a-friend): RDF-metadata enhanced social networking in chemistry

CHED 760

Henry S. Rzepa, rzepa@ic.ac.uk, Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom and Egon L. Willighagen, Plant Research International, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Applied Bioinformatics, Postbus 16, Wageningen, NL-6700 AA, Netherlands.
FOAF is an RDF-based metadata approach using information triples to describing individuals in a social networking context. It has the potential of allowing a group of individuals with common interests to both discover common overlaps in their research and teaching activities, to disseminate their publications to each other, to communicate their (intended or past) attendance at conferences, and to organize activities into project based approaches. Importantly, RDF is designed to allow such social discovery, by both students and academics, to operate in a machine automatable and discoverable sense (humans tend to do this via the rather more chaotic and ad hoc processes of exchanging emails, phoning, meeting at conferences and tools such as LinkedIn). We will discuss how the activities of one such grouping of chemists, the Blue Obelisk group, can be promoted by the use of FOAF and FOAF-Explorer and show how FOAF can be integrated with semantic chemistry as part of a chemical semantic web.