Good grief. Anyway, this exploration is certainly opening more doors than it’s closing. Actually, that’s not quite right. It’s showing me new doors that I choose to go through. This one had FOAF written on it in shiny brass letters.

FOAF is a project under the RDFWeb umbrella, and is an effort to build a vocabulary for expressing relationships between and facts about things on the interweb. As with REST, a key axiom (hrm, is that verging on the tautalogical?) is that URIs are very important, in uniquely identifying resources. There’s a good introductory article by Edd Dumbill on FOAF.

I’ve had a first hash at a FOAF file to describe me, and it’s here. In the growing fury of social network construction and subsequent mining, this could be interesting. Hey, and it doesn’t have to stop there… Under the influence of a small tumbler of Glenmorangie, I can half-imagine a situation where we have compound business documents and partners in an ERP system like SAP‘s R/3 exposed and linked (through the philosophical transparency of REST) to one another via their URIs, with those link relationships described in a FOAFy (RDFlike?) way.

Hrmmmm…