RELATIONSHIP: A vocabulary for describing relationships between people

Each class or property in the vocabulary has a URI constructed by appending a term name to the vocabulary URI. For example:

The term name for a class always starts with an uppercase character. Where the term name is comprised of multiple concatenated words, the leading character of each word will be an uppercase character. For example:

The term name for a property always starts with an lowercase character. Where the term name is comprised of multiple concatenated words, the leading character of the second and each subsequent word will be an uppercase character. For example:

Summary of Terms

Vocabulary Classes

Vocabulary Properties

Examples

Term Name	Type	Definition
Relationship	class	A particular type of connection existing between people related to or having dealings with each other.
acquaintanceOf	property	A person having more than slight or superficial knowledge of this person but short of friendship.
ambivalentOf	property	A person towards whom this person has mixed feelings or emotions.
ancestorOf	property	A person who is a descendant of this person.
antagonistOf	property	A person who opposes and contends against this person.
apprenticeTo	property	A person to whom this person serves as a trusted counselor or teacher.
childOf	property	A person who was given birth to or nurtured and raised by this person.
closeFriendOf	property	A person who shares a close mutual friendship with this person.
collaboratesWith	property	A person who works towards a common goal with this person.
colleagueOf	property	A person who is a member of the same profession as this person.
descendantOf	property	A person from whom this person is descended.
employedBy	property	A person for whom this person's services have been engaged.
employerOf	property	A person who engages the services of this person.
enemyOf	property	A person towards whom this person feels hatred, intends injury to, or opposes the interests of.
engagedTo	property	A person to whom this person is betrothed.
friendOf	property	A person who shares mutual friendship with this person.
grandchildOf	property	A person who is a child of any of this person's children.
grandparentOf	property	A person who is the parent of any of this person's parents.
hasMet	property	A person who has met this person whether in passing or longer.
knowsByReputation	property	A person known by this person primarily for a particular action, position or field of endeavour.
knowsInPassing	property	A person whom this person has slight or superficial knowledge of.
knowsOf	property	A person who has come to be known to this person through their actions or position.
lifePartnerOf	property	A person who has made a long-term commitment to this person's.
livesWith	property	A person who shares a residence with this person.
lostContactWith	property	A person who was once known by this person but has subsequently become uncontactable.
mentorOf	property	A person who serves as a trusted counselor or teacher to this person.
neighborOf	property	A person who lives in the same locality as this person.
parentOf	property	A person who has given birth to or nurtured and raised this person.
participant	property
participantIn	property
siblingOf	property	A person having one or both parents in common with this person.
spouseOf	property	A person who is married to this person
worksWith	property	A person who works for the same employer as this person.
wouldLikeToKnow	property	A person whom this person would desire to know more closely.

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/Relationship
Label:	Relationship

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/acquaintanceOf
Label:	Acquaintance Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:acquaintanceOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/ambivalentOf
Label:	Ambivalent Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:ambivalentOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/ancestorOf
Label:	Ancestor Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Inverse of	rel:descendantOf
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:ancestorOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/antagonistOf
Label:	Antagonist Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:antagonistOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/apprenticeTo
Label:	Apprentice To
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Inverse of	rel:mentorOf
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:apprenticeTo implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/childOf
Label:	Child Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Inverse of	rel:parentOf
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:childOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/closeFriendOf
Label:	Close Friend Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:closeFriendOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/collaboratesWith
Label:	Collaborates With
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:collaboratesWith implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/colleagueOf
Label:	Colleague Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:colleagueOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/descendantOf
Label:	Descendant Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Inverse of	rel:ancestorOf
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:descendantOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/employedBy
Label:	Employed By
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Inverse of	rel:employerOf
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:employedBy implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/employerOf
Label:	Employer Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Inverse of	rel:employedBy
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:employerOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/enemyOf
Label:	Enemy Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:enemyOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/engagedTo
Label:	Engaged To
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:engagedTo implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/friendOf
Label:	Friend Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:friendOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/grandchildOf
Label:	Grandchild Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Inverse of	rel:grandparentOf
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:grandchildOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/grandparentOf
Label:	Grandparent Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Inverse of	rel:grandchildOf
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:grandparentOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/hasMet
Label:	Has Met
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:hasMet implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/knowsByReputation
Label:	Knows By Reputation
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:knowsByReputation implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/knowsInPassing
Label:	Knows In Passing
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:knowsInPassing implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/knowsOf
Label:	Knows Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:knowsOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/lifePartnerOf
Label:	Life Partner Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:lifePartnerOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/livesWith
Label:	Lives With
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:livesWith implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/lostContactWith
Label:	Lost Contact With
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:lostContactWith implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/mentorOf
Label:	Mentor Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Inverse of	rel:apprenticeTo
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:mentorOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/neighborOf
Label:	Neighbor Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:neighborOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/parentOf
Label:	Parent Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Inverse of	rel:childOf
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:parentOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/participant
Label:	Participant
Domain	rel:Relationship
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:participant implies being something that, amongst other things, is a rel:Relationship

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/participantIn
Label:	Participant In
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	rel:Relationship
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:participantIn implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/siblingOf
Label:	Sibling Of
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:siblingOf implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/spouseOf
Label:	Spouse Of
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/worksWith
Label:	Works With
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:worksWith implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

URI:	http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/wouldLikeToKnow
Label:	Would Like to Know
Domain	foaf:Person
Range	foaf:Person
Subproperty of	foaf:knows
Paraphrase (experimental)	Having a rel:wouldLikeToKnow implies being something that, amongst other things, is a foaf:Person

Using With FOAF

The RELATIONSHIP vocabulary can be used without modification with FOAF documents. Simply replace foaf:knows properties with a more specific property from this vocabulary. For backwards compatibility with older, non-RDF aware, tools, you may want to keep the foaf:knows property as well.

  
<rdf:RDF
      xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
      xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
      xmlns:rel="http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/"
      >

  <foaf:Person rdf:nodeID="ian">
    <foaf:name>Ian Davis</foaf:name>
    <foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title>
    <foaf:firstName>Ian</foaf:firstName>
    <foaf:surname>Davis</foaf:surname>

    <rel:hasMet>
      <foaf:Person>
        <foaf:name>William Tell</foaf:name>
      </foaf:Person>
    </rel:hasMet>

    <rel:collaboratesWith rdf:nodeID="eric"/>
  </foaf:Person>
	
  <foaf:Person rdf:nodeID="eric">
    <foaf:nick>pixel</foaf:nick>
  </foaf:Person>



</rdf:RDF>

Using With HTML and XHTML

The relationship vocabulary can be used to describe relationships with the people linked from a web page. This is particularly useful for blogrolls or contact lists but can be used with any type of link. The HTML a element provides two attributes, rel and rev, that can be used to specify the relationship. Both rel and rev take a space separated list of keywords as their value. To use a term from the relationship vocabulary just drop the http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/ namespace to leave the property name, e.g. http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/worksWith would become worksWith which can be added as the value of rel or rev.

rel

The rel attribute specifies a relationship that the author of the linked page has with the author of the linking page. For example:

<a href="http://example.com/boats" rel="childOf">The boat we restored"</a>

This link states that the author of http://example.com/boats is a child of the author of the html above.

rev

The rev attribute specifies a relationship that the author of the linking page has with the author of the linked page. The example here is:

<a href="http://example.com/boats" rev="childOf">The boat we restored"</a>

In this case the meaning of the link is reversed: the author of the html above is a child of the author of http://example.com/boats.

The HTML and XHTML recommendations require an HTML document to declare a custom profile if it uses any non-standard rel or rev types. This is done by adding a profile attribute with a value of http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/ to the document's head element.

  <head profile="http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/">
    <title>People I Know</title>
  </head>

Complete Example

  <html>
    <head profile="http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/">
      <title>People I Know</title>
    </head>
    <body>
      <p>Here are the people I know:</p>
        <ul>
          <li><a href="http://example.com/~freddy" rel="closeFriendOf">Freddy (he's cool!)</a></li>
          <li><a href="http://frooble.com/" rel="mentorOf">Jimbo</a></li>
          <li><a href="http://mmmm.com/klm" rel="friendOf">Katie</a></li>
          <li><a href="http://example.com/~omah" rel="worksWith">Omah (coderman)</a></li>
          <li><a href="http://example.com/~jason" rev="closeFriendOf employedBy">Jason, da boss</a></li>
        </ul>
      </body>
    </html>

RDF Interpretation

Custom parsers that extract RDF from (X)HTML can use the relationships expressed in the links to infer the equivilent RDF triples. It should be remembered that the relationship is between the authors of the pages not between the pages themselves. Given the following link on a document at http://example.com/mypage.html:

<a href="http://example.com/boats" rel="childOf">The boat we restored"</a>

a suggested RDF extraction is:

  <foaf:Person>
    <foaf:maker rdf:resource="http://example.com/boats"/>
    <rel:childOf>
      <foaf:Person>
        <foaf:maker rdf:resource="http://example.com/mypage.html"/>
      </foaf:Person>
    </rel:childOf>
  </foaf:Person>

RELATIONSHIP: A vocabulary for describing relationships between people

Table of Contents

Introduction

Changes From Previous Version

Namespace

Summary of Terms

Vocabulary Classes

Class: Relationship

History

Vocabulary Properties

Property: acquaintanceOf

History

Property: ambivalentOf

History

Property: ancestorOf

History

Property: antagonistOf

History

Property: apprenticeTo

History

Property: childOf

History

Property: closeFriendOf

History

Property: collaboratesWith

History

Property: colleagueOf

History

Property: descendantOf

History

Property: employedBy

History

Property: employerOf

History

Property: enemyOf

History

Property: engagedTo

History

Property: friendOf

History

Property: grandchildOf

History

Property: grandparentOf

History

Property: hasMet

History

Property: knowsByReputation

History

Property: knowsInPassing

History

Property: knowsOf

History

Property: lifePartnerOf

History

Property: livesWith

History

Property: lostContactWith

History

Property: mentorOf

History

Property: neighborOf

History

Property: parentOf

History

Property: participant

History

Property: participantIn

History

Property: siblingOf

History

Property: spouseOf

History

Property: worksWith

History

Property: wouldLikeToKnow

History

Examples

Using With FOAF

Using With HTML and XHTML

Complete Example