[spec] format discussion

Hi everyone,

since we're starting with the topics now, here's the first one.

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Introduction
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I have talked to several people in my research about infographic resumes,
classic resumes, recruiting, and semantics, and we are trying to get
several areas of expertise together.

The more technically inclined people are usually asking me whether this
group is doing anything new at all since there are already ways to have a
resume format that can be extracted, for example HTML with microformats,
FOAF, schema.org, RDF, etc.

Recruiters and people from a social sciences and design background usually
tell me they want it to be easy to use and it needs to be widely accepted,
then they'd love something more visual instead of the typical textual
resumes they receive.

Fact is that there are lots of resume services that let you choose a
textual template where you fill in your data or more visual sites like
http://re.vu/, http://www.kinzaa.org/, http://vizualize.me/, and many more.
They require a registration, are not open source, and you do not know what
happens with your data and they are usually not accessible. All of these
points I have already tried to describe in earlier posts, the group
description, or the charter.

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Proposal
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In order to move on now, I would like to propose a new standard format for
resumes that translates easily into other formats, both textual (e.g.
semantic HTML) and visual (e.g. SVG), but is also manually writeable
without losing legibility.

What this means is that we would provide not only a specification for this
format but also open source code for developers that directly translates
our specified tags into HTML with microformats, HTML with schema.org tags,
SVG with whatever semantic options we find most valuable, and probably
other formats that we find usable. This code base can then be used by
developers anywhere in order to create a semantically useful resume. Every
company could develop their own system based on their needs and there could
be several services on the Web that let applicants fill in their data and
then simply download a file in the format we specified, infographic
templates, classic textual resumes, and more - all by filling the data out
once.

The format that we want to introduce could either be a schema.org
extension, a new file format, or something else - your input would be
helpful here now as to what you find best.

Personally, after many talks with recruiters, I find it best to have a file
(maybe using a new file ending: .cv2?) with simple tags, such as for
example:

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file: scrooge_resume.cv2
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<fullName>Scrooge McDuck
<givenName>Scrooge
<address>Duckburgh 1337
(...)

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Future
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Then this file .cv2 that contains the above values can be imported into
systems that can interpret this format and this can then further be
translated into various semantic resume markups as well as SVGs according
to a visual template the user chooses (use cases are helpful here).
Ideally, our .cv2 is the underlying basis, but any HTML or SVG that is
extracted from this .cv2 can be reproduced back into a clear .cv2 file.

I will create a more visual representation of this within the next days and
make a post on our blog about it. Please use this e-mail thread to reply
with suggestions, questions, or ideas.

Cheers,
Sanja