The foaf:nick property relates a foaf:Person to a short (often abbreviated) nickname, such as those use in IRC chat, online accounts, and computer logins.

This property is necessarily vague, because it does not indicate any particular naming control authority, and so cannot distinguish a person's login from their (possibly various) IRC nicknames or other similar identifiers. However it has some utility, since many people use the same string (or slight variants) across a variety of such environments.

For specific controlled sets of names (relating primarily to Instant Messanger accounts), FOAF provides some convenience properties: foaf:jabberID, foaf:aimChatID, foaf:msnChatID and foaf:icqChatID. Beyond this, the problem of representing such accounts is not peculiar to Instant Messanging, and it is not scaleable to attempt to enumerate each naming database as a distinct FOAF property. The foaf:OnlineAccount term (and supporting vocabulary) are provided as a more verbose and more expressive generalisation of these properties.