batch convert vCards and LDIF collections to FOAF

About this tool

The "Friend Of A Friend" (FOAF) project is part of the Semantic Web initiative to describe human relationships in a machine readable form. Each person's profile contains a number of personal information together with brief descriptions of their friends and aquaintances. The relationships themselves can be classified by using different vocabularies and can also include people you have lost contact with or would like to meet one day. If known, a friend's description should also include a link to his or her FOAF description online. That way a FOAF based spider (so called scutters) can explore and connect all existing FOAF descriptions and build a model of a social network.
A more detailed introduction to the HOW's and WHY's of FOAF, please see here.
Similar to the original FOAF-a-matic by Leigh Dodds, you can use this tool to comfortably batch convert an email address book, edit and manually add entries to compile them into a FOAF profile in 3 simple steps. Contacts can be imported as vCards and the LDIF file format. Most email clients can at least output one of these two.
Until now vCards are probably the more commonly available standard for exchanging contact information (RFC 2426). LDIF stands for "LDAP Data Interchange Format" and is a slightly newer official Internet standards track protocol (RFC 2849). Some e-mail clients (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird) directly support the export of address books in this format.
As address books tend to be quite large, the tool will only consider the first 500 entries. It also tries to pre-process the incoming data to help you with the creation of your profile. People which have your workplace's homepage domain name in their email address are pre-selected with the "worksWith" type of relationship. That value can be of course changed individually.

Usage

Fill in all desired fields in form below and upload or choose an online address collection. You can also skip importing any contacts just add them manually. On the next screen you'll see all entries of the selected file. For each person you can specify the type of relationship you have and edit their personal details. Entries you have edited are automatically selected to be included in your FOAF profile, though all other entries need to be included manually. There are also options to select/deselect all.
The final screen will show you the generated FOAF description which should be copied & pasted into a new textfile and saved as "foaf.rdf" somewhere accessible online. There's also an option to save the output as file. More information how to successfully publish and link to your profile can be found on that page.

Privacy information

As a rule of thumb, please only include details in your profile you feel comfortable with to be public. None of the personal information entered here will be used for any other purposes than to create your FOAF description file and will only be stored on this server until the uploaded address file has been translated. Or, if using the automatic file creation option the generated FOAF file will be deleted after max. 24 hours. All e-mail addresses (incl. your own) will be encrypted and stored as a SHA1 digital signature by default, but can be left in its original form if you wish so (see the options on next page). Because FOAF is using e-mail addresses as unique ID for each person, providing your email address and name is mandatory. All other fields are considered optional.

Personal Data

Some information about you, and how people can contact you
Title (Mr, Mrs, Dr, etc)
First Name *
Last Name (Family) *
Nickname
Your Email Address *
Homepage
Weblog
Your Picture
Primary Instant Messenger ID
Phone Number

Contacts

Upload a file with your email contacts
local vCard or LDIF addressbook
or
addressbook URL
you can use these test files LDIF, vCards

Work

Information about your work place
Work Homepage
Page describing what you do at work

School

Where did you go to school/university/college?
School Homepage

Interests

List your favourite interests
If possible interests should relate to online resources about a particular subject, ie. specify them as URL. If you are a user of del.icio.us simply type in your user name and the tool will use the 10 most used tags as your interests.
del.icio.us user name
or
Interest #1
Interest #2
Interest #3
Interest #4
Interest #5
  * mandatory fields

Source code & Credits

The source code for this project is released under the Creative Commons License and can be downloaded from here:
foafgen_v0.3.0.zip
Requirements: Author: Karsten Schmidt <info at toxi dot co dot uk>
my FOAF profile URL: http://toxi.co.uk/foaf.rdf
Thanks to Leigh Dodds, Libby Miller and everyone on #foaf

Version history:

v0.3.0 v0.2.3 v0.2.2 v0.2.1 v0.2 v0.1.2 v0.1.1

To do's:

last updated: March 29 2006 07:41:37.