foafmbox

foafmbox is a term used in the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) vocabulary to represent a person’s electronic mailbox. In RDF usage, the corresponding property is foaf:mbox, which is commonly referred to simply as foafmbox in documentation and code. The property links a foaf:Person to their mailbox address and is part of describing contact information in a person-centered data model.

Value and syntax: The object of foaf:mbox is typically a mailto: URI identifying the mailbox, rather than plain text. Example: <http://example.org/people/alice> foaf:mbox <mailto:[email protected]> . This encoding follows the standard mail URI scheme so that software can resolve or filter by the address.

Privacy considerations and alternatives: To protect privacy while enabling some level of matching, FOAF also defines foaf:mbox_sha1sum, which holds the SHA-1 hash of the email address. A client can compare a hash without exposing the email itself. Some implementations may publish only the hashed value or omit the mbox property entirely.

Context and standards: FOAF provides a lightweight ontology for describing people, their activities, and their relationships on the Web. The vocabulary was introduced in the early 2000s by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller and remains a reference in RDF-based person data. The foaf:mbox property is defined in the FOAF namespace (http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/mbox).