FOAFCorp: Corporate Friends of Friends

What is this?

RDF is a great data format for describing interconnected entities. With FOAF, we have a simple fun vocabulary for describing social networks, people, organisations etc. The FOAFCorp experiment extends this to describe in more detail the structure and interconnections of corporate entities. The sample data here draws on the excellent They Rule approach, listing the board membership for three companies.

Resources

A little more information is available...

• Dean Jackson's SVG foafCORP viewer (FOAFNaut began from same codebase)
• Sample RDF/XML FOAFCorp file (hand-transcribed from www.theyrule.net)
• TODO: write the rdf schema that defines the classes and relations ('properties', in RDF terminology) used in this data. To summarise, we define two classes: fc:Company, fc:Committee, and three properties: fc:name, fc:stock and fc:member. They are used alongside the base FOAF vocabulary.
• Graphical visualisation of the RDF (produced with RDFAuthor)
• They Rule (discussion list)
• Aaron Swartz prototyped a CWM/N3 tool for querying and reasoning about this data. The prototype uses Tim Berners-Lee's RDF inference engine 'cwm' to identify companies that are connected by common board members. These somewhat cryptic rules explain to machines what 'connectedTo' means in terms of having common board members.
• More data! I found some photos of the Coca Cola board that it would be fun to markup, based on the RDFWeb codepiction service (missing 404! doh. need to track this down. hmm: board mugshots via scrolly javascript thing; eg robinson)
• Damian Steer's RDFAuthor (macosx version) can also support graphical queries, which are answered by an RDF query web service.
• see also: W3C RDF and Semantic Web pages for technology background
• UI folk might be interested in using W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format as an alternative presentation mechanism. The Adobe plugin is pretty good. Note that the RDF file above can't be directly consumed by most web browsers (although see jibbering.com for some clientside RDF tools), and that an SVG visualisation of the data is different to the raw RDF, even though both formats are written in XML syntax. The Accessibility Features of SVG note outlines some techniques for producing SVG that can also be consumed by RDF query applications (ie. look pretty and include machine-friendly data).
• SVG visualization of foaf-corp data (generated by RDFAuthor)
• screenshot of theyrule with RDF stuff in background
• FOAFCorp is semantic web vapourware for the masses
• US Govt data (see EDGAR especially) (thanks to mnott for the link)
• Of related interest: DOW ethics debate

author: Dan Brickley <danbri@rdfweb.org>

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