What
FUTIL collects different utils implemented in python to manipulate FOAF files.
Currently, FUTIL includes:
- FOAF Crawler: a generic engine to navegate FOAFs perfoming different and configurable operations.
- FOAF Index/Search: using PyLucene as backend. That's a plain syntactic search.
- FOAF Parsing: implementation to extract FOAF data to a python dictionary datatype. It uses an easily extensible filter system.
- REST interface to search. At least you can ask in an URI an receive a XML with results.
Soon:
- Web interface to search in crawled and indexed FOAFs.
Why
Futil is the confluence of two interests: originally we pretend to index FOAF, allowing people to search his friends. There is no easy (enough) way to know where are the FOAFs of your friends. At the same time, Sergio was developing SWAML and founded a new requirement: given a SHA codification of an email, try to find the FOAF of the author.
The natural solution was retrive the SHA data in the same crawling process and offer a web service interface to search. And that's FUTIL.
Fútil in spanish means "futile" or "trivial". Although we work on semantic web related stuff, that's a personal project: we maintain this software in our free time.
Who (contact)
-
Iván Frade
(
)
-
Sergio Fernández
()
If you wish to contact with us, please use the development mailing list.
Where (files)
At the moment, you've to browse SVN repository. We expect to offer soon tarballs and a web interface to search.
Related links
- FOAF: the Friend-of-a-Friend project.
- pingthesemanticweb.com: we are pinging every new FOAF we discover during crawler process.
- WESO: our semantic web interest group at university.
- SWAML: Sergio's degree project.
- Python: all would be impossible without this beautiful programming language.