Quatuo

Semantic web

The Semantic Web is the next big evolution of the World Wide Web in which the meaning of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for softwares and applications to "understand" the data.

Semantic technologies decouple applications from data throw the use of a simple abstract model for the representation of knowledge. This allows any application that understands the data to consume any data found anywhere using the model.

The goal is to make the web "machine readable".

FOAF (aka Friend of a friend)

FOAF is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other peoples. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.

To view a sample foaf profile, click here.

Quatuo

Quatuo is a service allowing you to create, view, edit, and publish your friend of a friend (aka foaf) profile on the web. You can also use Quatuo to search profiles and find relations between peoples.

By putting references to your foaf profiles on your content, you will allow applications like Google search engine to better understand and reference your content. This is a blog post from google on how they deal with foaf.