foafname

foafname is a term commonly used to describe the FOAF property foaf:name, which represents the real-world name of a person or agent in RDF data. It is part of the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) vocabulary, a W3C-inspired project designed to describe people, their activities, and their relationships on the social web.

In RDF terms, foaf:name is typically a literal string and may be language-tagged to reflect multilingual names or scripts. It is intended to store the display or full name as it is commonly written, rather than strictly parsed name components. For more granular components, the FOAF vocabulary provides foaf:givenName and foaf:familyName, which can be used in combination with foaf:name if a dataset needs both full names and their parts.

Usage examples are common in semantic web data. A triple might state that a person resource has foaf:name "Alice Smith"@en, optionally alongside foaf:givenName "Alice" and foaf:familyName "Smith" for structured queries or localization.

Foaf:name is complementary to other name-related vocabularies, such as vCard or schema.org, but remains a core element within FOAF. When designing data, practitioners should consider multilingual requirements, name variants, and privacy implications, since names can be identifying.

Note that foafname is not an official separate property in the FOAF vocabulary; if encountered as foafname, it is typically a nonstandard alias or a shorthand for foaf:name. In interoperable datasets, using foaf:name with the proper namespace is recommended. The FOAF vocabulary was developed to describe people and their networks and has seen broad, though varied, adoption in early semantic web projects.