FOAFMap.net

FOAFMap.net

FOAFMap is a personnal project I wrote in order to see how Semantic Web and Web2.0 ideas could merge together. The goal is to display geolocated information about people retrieved from FOAF personnal or group profiles on a GoogleMap. If you don't have a FOAF profile, you can create one here. For group profiles, check this page since you already got a few files for its members.

Usage

Simply provide the URL of a FOAF profile and click "Map it !". FOAFMap will render the associated map, with informations about people you know or group members and links to FOAF Explorer for each people that gets his own profile.

Caching data

As the rendering time to create a map can be long, you can cache the map so that it will be displayed faster in the future. Just check "Cache results ?" when creating it. You'll get an URI as

http://foafmap/net/user/user_id

corresponding to your map. To update your map, simply redo this. The URL will stay the same.

Tags

Created maps can be tagged. Actually, these tags are foaf:interest extracted from FOAF profiles. For each tag, there's a page where you can see what maps are tagged with. As interests are defined by an URI but also can have a title, which can be different regarding the profiles, there are "tag aliases". The tagcloud displays the first-created alias for each interest.

Credits

FOAFMap uses PHOAF, a PHP API for parsing FOAF files which is strongly based on RAP. It also uses phpThumb() for depiction rendering. It has a MySQL backend, and runs on a Debian server with Apache. Icons by Mark James.

Privacy

I'm partisan of the "You publish data, some use it" approach of Semantic Web, so I don't see any privacy issue here. Yet, if you created a map and wish to remove it, send me an e-mail. According to the french law and as some personal data are stored on the server, this website is declared to the CNIL.

News and updates

You can check posts about FOAFMap on my weblog for updates, or more generally Semantic Web posts. Here's also an RSS feed dedicated to FOAFMap posts.

Contact

You can drop me a mail at alex@passant.org.