Saturday, July 28, 2007

Vocabularies for contact details

Here's a list of vocabularies that can be used to define people/groups/projects details:
  • FOAF - Friend Of A Friend (Version 0.9 in RDF): it is the most popular vocabulary for representing people and groups details and relationships. One of the things I've always been curious about, is how FOAF models the names (name, given name, first name, family name, surname are all in the vocabulary in 'testing' status). An interesting reading about it can be found in the FOAF wiki. Moreover, FOAF includes also classes such as Project (defined as 'a collective endeavour of some kind' keeping in mind that a project can be not only collective but also individual.. uh?) and Document (which is loosely defined as class that represents those things which are, broadly conceived, 'documents'. An Image is a subclass of Document).
  • CONTACT (Version 1.13 in RDF) by Tim Berners Lee. I don't know if you can find a 'human readable' resource on it. You probably have to read the rdf file. It is a quite complete vocabulary for defining all contact details of a person. You can find also properties like "nearest airport" or "mother tongue".
  • VCARD (Version 3.0 in RDF). vCard is defined by RFC 2426 and this RDF representation provides equivalent functionality to its standard format.
  • DOAP - Description Of A Project (website, rdf).

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