Lazyweb: a better foaf-file maker

Making good FOAF files is a pain. There’s the foaf-a-matic web page, that lets you type stuff in and formats it for you, but who wants to re-type all that data? There’s a Java-based successor, but that’s overkill, and still doesn’t have any way to import data, as far as I can tell.

Thanks to Address Book Exporter, it’s easy for me to extract data from my address book in a tabular form. I suspect that most people interested in using FOAF probably already have their data typed in somewhere, and would be able to extract it in this form if needed. From there, it would be pretty easy to use GREP to mark up the file into a usable FOAF file, except for the sha1 e-mail address encoding (which is not required, but is the responsible thing to do). And not everyone would be comfortable writing a GREP pattern, for that matter.

What we need is a little web utility that ingests tab-delimited text files and spits out FOAF files. I know it can be done–it’s just out of my reach.

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