|
|
FOAFBot is an IRC bot that provides access to a knowledge base created by spidering FOAF files.
It can sit on an IRC channel and provide basic informational help about the members of a community.
The purpose of this page is to provide information about the bot, including basic usage and deployment instructions. Before reading on please pay attention to this disclaimer:
FOAFBot is experimental software. It is developed currently for the benefit of its author. You are welcome to use it within the terms set out in the license, but the author makes no guarantee as to the quality of this software, or even if it will work for you at all.
Demonstration
A FOAFBot instance is running on the #foaf channel on the Freenode IRC network, irc://irc.freenode.net/foaf
The bot can be interrogated with simple questions about the properties of community members. People can be identified either by their IRC nick, full name, or email address:
<edd> foafbot, edd's name
<foafbot> edd's name is 'Edd Dumbill', according to Dan Brickley,
Anon35, Niel Bornstein, Jo Walsh, Dave Beckett, Edd Dumbill,
Matt Biddulph, Paul Ford
You can see the answer the bot found, along with the owners of the files it found the answer in. The person Anon35 has either not signed their file, or provided a bad signature.
Read more about signing FOAF files.
Other properties which can be asked for in the same way as name include: email nick image workplace phone homepage. You can also ask for urls, which shows the URLs of the FOAF files belonging to that person.
FOAFBot also has the capability to find pictures of people in the community. Here's an example:
<edd> foafbot: picture of edd and yoz
<foafbot> Picture at http://matthau.yoz.com/cam/20020609/bots_talk4.jpg
-- according to Edd Dumbill
<foafbot> Caption: From left to right: Edd, Yoz, Matt Webb,
Jo Walsh, Celia Romaniuk
You can ask for picture of and string as many names as you want together with and. Asking for just one name works well, too.
The bot responds to queries by private message, as well as being addressed in public in a channel.
Implementation
FOAFBot is written in Python, and requires Python 2.2 or higher to run. It uses Dave Beckett's excellent Redland RDF toolkit, which must be installed.
Like FOAFBot, Redland is currently in development. At the time of writing, 11 June 2003, a development snapshot of Redland is required, or any release version numbered 0.9.13 or higher. It may be best to compile Redland from CVS.
Distribution
FOAFBot is written by Edd Dumbill, and is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.0.
You may download the source code here. The current released version number is 0.5, and was released on 11th June 2002. A ChangeLog is also available.
See the files INSTALL and README for details of how to run the bot.
Questions
Please try hard to find answers for yourself before contacting the author. You may find help in the FOAF IRC channel. Alternatively, send email to foafbot@usefulinc.com.