Representing Distributed Groups with dgFOAF

Managing one’s memberships in different online communities increasingly becomes a cumbersome task. This is due to the increasing number of communities in which users participate and in which they share information with different groups of people like colleagues, sports clubs, groups with specific interests, family, friends, and others. These groups use different platforms to perform their tasks such as collaborative creation of documents, sharing of documents and media, conducting polls, and others. Thus, the groups are scattered and distributed over multiple community platforms that each require a distinct user account and management of the group. In this paper, we present dgFOAF, an approach for distributed group management based on the well known Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) vocabulary. Our dgFOAF approach is independent of the concrete community platforms we find today and needs no central server. It allows for defining communities across multiple systems and alleviates the community administration task. Applications of dgFOAF range from access restriction to trust support based on community membership.