FOAF or Friend Of A Friend is an attempt to tackle two of the problems of the "social network" systems such as Friendster and Orkut. One problem is that the personal data isn't machine-readable, and the other is that it is probably not held in a standard format, such as vCard. FOAF provides a format for putting the data on the Web in RDF/XML. It was the subject of two lively sessions at ETech, where it got enthusiastic support. You can read more about it here: http://www.foaf-project.org/
Ben Hammersley mentioned FOAF a year ago in Online, here
