FOAF-Academic Ontology: A Vocabulary for the Academic Community

The aim of Semantic Web is to add machineprocessable information to the Web. Our focus is on information related to people. This problem in Semantic Web is addressed by the FOAF Vocabulary. FOAF Vocabulary describes people, their activities and the people they know. The terms defined in this vocabulary let us say general things about us and people we know. But the terms in FOAF define people generally, and for example don´t let us talk about professional achievements and bring us near to specific academic communities of our interest. The entire social network is composed of communities, and we have chosen to contribute on academic community. In this article we introduce a new vocabulary, FOAF-Academic, which we have built up on the OAF vocabulary by restricting it to communication in academic communities (e.g., exclude personal data), as well as extending it were required to cover academic-specific terms and relationships (e.g., add the co-author relationship). We have described this ontology and the technologies under which it is implemented. This ontology will help the academic community in saying anything about their achievements, their qualifications, activities and the communities that are near to them, in a machine readable format in order to be processed by both human and machine.