foafGroup

foafGroup is a term commonly used to refer to the FOAF Group concept in the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary. The official class name is foaf:Group, defined in the FOAF namespace (http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/). A foaf:Group represents a collection of agents—typically people or organizations—that form a social, project, or organizational group. The concept is designed to model group membership and group-level metadata in RDF data.

Key properties typically associated with a foaf:Group include foaf:name, which provides a human-readable label for the group; foaf:member, which relates the group to its members (resources that are foaf:Agent, such as foaf:Person or foaf:Organization); and foaf:homepage, which may point to a page describing the group. A group can also have foaf:depiction or other metadata to describe the group's appearance or purpose.

In RDF data, a foaf:Group instance is declared as a resource of type foaf:Group, and each member is linked via foaf:member. This allows applications to query which agents belong to a given group, retrieve member profiles, and navigate to related resources. The approach is lightweight and interoperable with other FOAF constructs, enabling simple social network modeling without a fixed enrollment schema.

Notes: The lowercase term foafGroup is sometimes used informally to refer to this concept, but the official term in the specification is foaf:Group. FOAF has been widely used in early semantic web projects; in modern systems it may be complemented or replaced by other schemas depending on requirements.