FOAFRealm

  1. FOAFRealm
    1. About
    2. Architecture
    3. Documentation
    4. Mailing lists
    5. Who uses FOAFRealm?

FOAFRealm is a service for authentication of users and management of users' profiles. It allows distributed authentication and trust infrastructure without a centralized authority. FOAFRealm delivers a backbone infrastructure for trust applications based on social relationships and allows to establish identity of users similar to the way we establish identity and trust in real life. It is based on solutions like the P2P HyperCuP topology and the FOAF ontology for expressing relationships between users on the Semantic Web.

The project was started by Sebastian Kruk in 2004. The first prototype was delivered in June 2004 as a submission to the FOAF Workshop in Galway.

Current version delivers a realm plugin for Apache Tomcat, together with a set of Java libraries and JSP/Servlets/Ajax user interface (the Aparicio component). Future implementations will deliver bindings for J2EE, .NET and PHP frameworks.

About

Here is a list of some of the most important features of FOAFRealm:

  • users can register and authenticate to the system using login and password or OpenID
  • users can setup relationship with other users
  • any relationship can be described with custom properties
  • profiles of users share common basic properties (name, e-mail), but users aren't restricted to predefined schema
  • authentication of users, management of users' profiles, DAO layer are all separate components, thus can be placed on separate machines

The latest release of the project can be downloaded here.

FOAFRealm sources are under version control system called Subversion (SVN). Currently the repository is located on SourceForge?.net servers. Everyone has an access to the repository, but in order to be able to commit changes, one must have an SourceForge?.net user account and be approved by one of the project's administrators as a FOAFRealm developer.

To browse the repository using the web browser follow the link.

Architecture

The following diagram depicts the architecture of the FOAFRealm service:

A web application uses authentication service provided by the Application Server. In our case we provide an implementation of such service called FOAFRealm-realm.

FOAFRealm-realm communicates over REST SOA with FOAFRealm-manage service in order to retrieve the needed data. FOAFRealm-manage can be integrated directly into our web application, thus simplifying the installation.

FOAFReam-manage provides API and UI for users' profiles management. It uses RDF database to store user data.

Documentation

Mailing lists

Who uses FOAFRealm?

Attachments