foafOrganization

foaf:Organization is a class in the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) vocabulary used to describe organizations as agents in RDF data. It covers entities such as companies, clubs, universities, and other groups, enabling structured representation of an organization’s identity and relationships. As a subclass of foaf:Agent, foaf:Organization can be linked to people, projects, and other resources within a graph.

Typical properties associated with foaf:Organization include foaf:name, which captures the organization’s legal or commonly used name, and foaf:homepage, which points to the organization’s official website. Other common properties are foaf:logo for a graphical emblem, foaf:mbox and foaf:phone for contact details, and foaf:depiction for a representative image. Optional properties such as foaf:topic_interest can describe areas of focus, and foaf:member can express membership relations to individuals (foaf:Person) or other organizations (foaf:Organization).

A key concept in FOAF is the foaf:member property, which enables the construction of organizational hierarchies and membership lists. Organizations may also be related to resources they created through properties like foaf:made, and to people who know or work with them via other FOAF relations. The vocabulary is designed to interlink with other RDF schemas, allowing a diverse range of descriptive data to be integrated.

Usage and scope: foaf:Organization is used in social networks, scholarly datasets, and personal or project pages to publish machine-readable organizational information. While newer metadata ecosystems have emerged, FOAF remains a foundational component in some semantic-web applications and legacy datasets, valued for its straightforward alignment with RDF triples and its focus on agents and their social structures.