FOAF (an acronym of friend of a friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database. The FOAF project, which defines and extends the vocabulary of a FOAF profile, was started in 2000 by and . It can be considered the first Social Semantic Web application, in that it combines RDF technology with 'social web' concerns.