Frequently Asked Questions
Technology
What web standards are supported?
Social Networking
· Friend of a Friend (FOAF)
· XFN
Web
· OpenID
· REST API
· hCard
· vCard
· OPML
Coming Soon
· OAuth
· APML
What is FOAF?
Friend of a Friend (FOAF in short) is a machine readable data format representing a person and their connections (friends, other representation instances of that person or just references to all sorts of information). The use of FOAF is encouraged and supported by the Data Portability work group, in an effort to make the information already available on the web more accessible. Having friend connections available in a standard format helps web services interact and use this data in new and fascinating ways.
Microformats hCard and XFN
These microformats are a very simple way to annotate data, specifically profile information and friend connections for hcard and XFN (XHTML Friend Network) respectively. HCard annotated profiles are now readable by other web services, which makes profile importing a breeze. Our Profile Importer can automatically import data from your other hcard enabled profiles, it is freely available on Origo.
What is the semantic web and how does Proofile play a role in it?
The semantic web is an effort to give semantic information to the data collected on the web. Our FOAF RDF files contain all the semantic data that you enter, but only if you wish to have it exported (see Data Export section on the faq/settings tab). The files urls will be sent to PingTheSemanticWeb to ensure that they are easily reachable.
