What is the FOAF Project?

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. FOAF is about your place in the Web, and the Web's place in our world. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online. -- www.foaf-project.org

What is FOAF.Vix?

FOAF.Vix is a visualizer and relation explorer for FOAF (Friend of a Friend) files. Although this file format is designed first of all to be machine readable, it is often desirable to be able to browse it as if it were a usual Web page. FOAF.Vix gives you this possibility, presenting the data from a FOAF file in an easy to understand form and allowing to follow links to other Web resources it contains, including links to other FOAF pages, thereby allowing you to explore the network of human relations.

Highlighted Features

Standalone or customizable embedded web widget.
Additional JSON output support.
Localization (ca,da,de,el,en,eo,es,fr,ja,la,nb,pl,uk).
Autodiscovery support.
Microformats friendly (outputs hCard, hCalendar, adr, geo).
Extracts FOAF data from XHTML RDFa 1.0.
Nice-looking.
Simple and fast (uses 48h local caching).

Usage

1. Standalone mode

To view any FOAF file, supply its URL as an argument to FOAF.Vix, like this:

http://foaf-visualizer.gnu.org.ua/?uri=FOAF_FILE_URI

For instance:

http://foaf-visualizer.gnu.org.ua/?uri=http://www.example.com/foaf.rdf

An HTML example, i.e. linking your FOAF file to FOAF.Vix from your web site:

Tip #1: It is also recommended to use a FOAF Autodiscovery in your web page.

2. Embedded mode: Web Widget

This mode allows to include a visualized FOAF information in your home page or blog. To do so, add the following HTML code to your page:

Tip #2: The presentation of FOAF data inside web widget is controlled by a CSS class foafvix. Its subclasses are named after the FOAF entries they control. These are:

fieldName, person, group, personName, ownerImage, ownerImageSmall, personalData, nick, birthday, dateOfBirth, weblog, onlineAccount, plan, geekcode, school, currentProject, pastProject, interest, knows, seeAlso, source

This allows you to adjust the default style sheet. To resign fully from using the default CSS, add nocss=1 parameter.

3. Embedded mode: JSON output

This mode returns a JSON data stucture.

http://foaf-visualizer.gnu.org.ua/embed/json/?uri=FOAF_FILE_URI

Specifying a callback function

If you intend to use this API from JavaScript inside a browser, you'll need to use the callback parameter, specifying a callback function to run with the response object, like this:

http://foaf-visualizer.gnu.org.ua/embed/json/?uri=FOAF_FILE_URI&callback=foo

Localization

By default FOAF.Vix tries to guess in which language to present the page by using your browser settings. You can explicitly specify the output language using hl parameter. Its argument is a ISO 639 code of the required language. For example, the following will display the FOAF page in French:

http://foaf-visualizer.gnu.org.ua/?uri=FOAF_FILE_URI&hl=fr

Currently FOAF.Vix supports the following languages: Catalan (ca), Danish (da), German (de), Greek (el), English (en), Esperanto (eo), Spanish (es), French (fr), Japanese (ja), Latin (la), Norwegian Bokmål (nb), Polish (pl), Ukrainian (uk).

New language contributions are welcome.

Source Code

The FOAF.Vix source code can be obtained by using a Git (source control) client.

Clone it anonymously from git://git.gnu.org.ua/fvx.git. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3.

Samples

Wojciech Polak (standalone)
Dave Beckett (standalone)
Dan Brickley (standalone)
Henry J. Story (standalone)
Sample Embeds (embedded)

Try it!

Feedback

Please send any bug reports, comments, suggestions, or questions to FOAF.Vix discussion group.

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