Re: vCard - Old vs. New?

Hi Richard,
Thanks - this is exactly the kind of substantiated counter-argument I 
was hoping for ;-)

But seriously - we must minimize this confusion. A first necessary step 
would be to complete the 2006 document - I just spent two hours 
searching for examples of how the new vCard should exactly be used, and 
I at least knew exactly what I was looking for. How much worse will the 
same task be for someone from outside of the SW/LOD box?

Martin


Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> Martin,
>
> On 7 May 2009, at 07:51, Martin Hepp (UniBW) wrote:
>> (Due to the masses of "old" vCard data, it would not be prudent for 
>> any data-consuming application to accept only "new" vCard data anyway 
>> - see my SWOOGLE figures from the initial mail - 230,000 vs. 470 
>> datasets - which implies that continuing to create "old"-style vCard 
>> should be tolerable.)
>
> This is a questionable conclusion for several reasons.
>
> 1. AFAICT the data from Swoogle is outdated. I haven't heard any news 
> from the project since 2007. Given that the new vCard-in-RDF work is 
> from November 2006, these stats might be misleading, and the sites 
> that Swoogle has indexed might have gone offline or changed to the new 
> namespace.
>
> 2. FWIW, Sindice reports 12k documents using the old and 254k using 
> the new one, but this is not comparable to the Swoogle numbers because 
> many of the new hits are from hcard microformats (which Sindice maps 
> into the new vCard namespace).
>
> 3. Pure document numbers say nothing about how "locked in" a standard 
> is. The 230k documents that Swoogle reports might all come from a 
> single site, and switching them all to a new namespace might be a 
> five-minute thing. (99% of the use that Sindice sees for the old 
> namespace is from Josh Tauberer's usgov dataset.)
>
> 4. Yahoo reports 1B+ hcard microformats on the Web. All 
> microformat-to-RDF converters I'm aware of map them to the new 
> namespace (e.g. any23, Swignition, SearchMonkey).
>
> I conclude that the old namespace is obsolete and should be ignored 
> and avoided, in the interest of converging on a single namespace.
>
> Best,
> Richard
>
>
>
>>
>>
>> Or am I wrong in any of those points?
>>
>> Best
>> Martin
>>
>> PS: Research in the economics of standardization shows that the 
>> migration to a new standard requires technology to reduce the 
>> switching costs for everybody involved (at least users and 
>> application developers). Otherwise, positive network externalities 
>> for the established standard cause inertia that may eventually 
>> prevent the broad adoption of the new standard. So just publishing a 
>> new version may not be sufficient given the strong position of the 
>> old vCard spec. We need conversion tools etc.
>>
>> Renato Iannella wrote:
>>>
>>> On 7 May 2009, at 12:08, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>>>
>>>> Interestingly, it doesn't seem like this question has ever come up
>>>> before. If there were a Working Group with this in scope, it could
>>>> (following appropriate process) publish a new version at that same
>>>> location, but short of that, there's no handy solution. Harry and I
>>>> have talked about it, though, and will try to come up with something.
>>>
>>>
>>>
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

e-mail: mhepp@computer.org
phone:  +49-(0)89-6004-4217
fax:    +49-(0)89-6004-4620
www:    http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
 	http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype:  mfhepp 


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