F·O·A·F is an early and widely‐used vocabulary which grew some·what organically within the R·D·F·Web community.
It is not necessarily weldesigned in all respects, but it has been commonly deployed as a vocabulary for modelling [Agents](foaf:Agent), and is often used alongside (which models the things they [make](foaf:made)).
D·C·M·I and F·O·A·F have a [good neighbour agreement](https://www.dublincore.org/collaborations/foaf/good_neighbour_agreement/) formalizing the fact that the two vocabularies often go hand‐in‐hand.
Due to its organically‐developed nature, terms in F·O·A·F were given a [status](vocabstatus:term_status), meant to indicate how stable their definitions ought to be considered.
These statuses have not been updated in over a decade, and are not preserved here; however, a status of at least testing was deemed a criterion for inclusion.
Otherwise, this ontology provides definitions for the bulk of F·O·A·F, wilfully excluding the following properties :—
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, , and are roundabout terms which indicate [Documents](foaf:Document) which [have a primary topic](foaf:primaryTopic) of a thing, rather than just indicating the thing itself.
This was a pragmatic choice by the authors of F·O·A·F because it was assumed these documents would have more welknown, and thus easily-queryable, I·R·I¦s.
But R·D·F tooling and understanding has significantly matured in the years since these properties were introduced, and they are far from bestpractice now.
(Just make a bloody blank node!)
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and are properties for identifying the original, not current, owner of an internet mailbox, and thus not useful for the actual sending of messages.
Originally, these properties were conceived as a means of determining [Agent](foaf:Agent) identity; in the case of , this intent is much better served by just using a tag:
U·R·I, which can be email‐derived.
is of questionable utility in practice.
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is a subclass of [Document](foaf:Document) which is used for R·D·F documents whose [primary topic](foaf:primaryTopic) is their [maker](foaf:maker).
But this relationship is more useful stated explicitly (i·e, with properties), and the class offers little.
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A number of properties (, , , , , ) are tied to specific online platforms; these are better served by the generic properties surrounding [Online Accounts](foaf:OnlineAccount).
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, for lack of any strong argument for inclusion.
F·O·A·F also makes use of a single class in the geo:
name·space, .
This ontology like·wise adopts this term.