Re: vcard:AddressBook

As someone involved in a few ontology standards myself (a few at OMG including the recently-adopted DPROD extension to DCAT, FIBO at EDM Council, LEI ontology at GLEIF) I find it hard to believe that W3C would appear to effectively abandon such a useful and widely-used standard as vCard. Though, as far as I can see, it was never a formal standard but merely a Member Submission?

I agree with giving W3C the chance to respond, and in fact just noticed https://github.com/solid/contacts/issues/8#issuecomment-2719050285 which indicates from the top a willingness to properly maintain it in W3C which I'd fully support.

Even if maintained in W3C I think we should aim for the following goals:

  *
Clear authoritative location (ideally GitHub)
  *
Published or generated documentation and examples (in addition to the ontology file)
  *
Clear transparent process for raising issues/suggesting changes
  *
Trusted people nominated to manage the process, approve changes and publish releases
  *
Namespace with long-term stability that resolves to the ontology

I think the W3C DCAT specification meets all the above and would be a good model to follow.

Regards
Pete



Pete Rivett (pete.rivett@federatedknowledge.com)
Federated Knowledge, LLC (LEI 98450013F6D4AFE18E67)
tel: +1-701-566-9534
Schedule a meeting at https://calendly.com/rivettp

________________________________
From: Michiel de Jong <michiel@unhosted.org>
Sent: Friday, March 14, 2025 1:14 AM
To: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
Cc: Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>; Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca>; semantic-web@w3.org <semantic-web@w3.org>
Subject: Re: vcard:AddressBook

Hi Dan,

I wanted to ask for some more details about what you wrote.

On Thu, 6 Mar 2025 at 16:08, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org<mailto:danbri@danbri.org>> wrote:
I believe the point of that vcard-rdf note was to reflect into RDF the existing vCard design rather than to improve upon it, ie making up new stuff.

Is this something that is set in stone? It seems that http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns# was originally created in 2010 with https://www.w3.org/submissions/2010/SUBM-vcard-rdf-20100120/, and then in 2014 https://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf/ updated it. It is now 2025, and in practice we are using 6 "squatted" terms, see https://github.com/solid/contacts/issues/11#issuecomment-2715154170.

Who is in charge of deciding the future of http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#? Is this something we as its users can influence?

If so then I see 4 possible ways forward:

1) keep squatting the terms like we are now (not the proper way to practise semantic web, of course)
2) publish a new note (after the 2010 one and the 2014 one), in which we update http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#
3) move our terms to FOAF and publish them there
4) redesign our addressbook functionality from scratch and switch for instance to SIOC, see https://github.com/solid/contacts/issues/8#issuecomment-2713487899

I would like to know what the process would be for option 2.


Many thanks,
Michiel de Jong
Solid CG co-chair