Raw

A great phrase, coined by Dave Beckett for this position paper. He's talking specifically about the Redland RDF tools, but it seems to be a more general phenomenon. For example, Edd's "Description of a Project" work ( DOAP), featuring a vocabulary to describe open source software projects is clearly influenced by FOAF, right up with the examples are files demonstrating how DOAP can be used alongside FOAF (the docs for DOAP are great btw, including articles at IBM developerWorks). Oh yes, and already there's a DOAP-a-matic for creating the stuff, following the style Leigh's online FOAF-a-matic. It's funny, one of the obvious uses for this vocab would be project update info via RSS - but now Edd's done the schema, putting the stuff in RSS should be a no-brainer.

The push for tools that can handle FOAF material alongside content management systems and so on seems to be having an impact too - Shelley's on the case of fitting up Raptor/Redland for PHP/MS Windows ( bravo!).

It may just be coincidence, but also today Uldis points to Benjamin Nowack's ARC RDF/XML Parser.

Having said all that, there seems to be plenty of RDF/SemWeb development without any clear link to FOAF, e.g. the new Eclipse-based IBM Semantics Toolkit.