Re: vcard:AddressBook

(Copying
mailto:resnick@episteme.net <resnick@episteme.net> from
https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/vcarddav/about/ on this discussion of
the maintainability of w3c’s rdf versions of vCard).

I’m repeating myself here but to be crystal clear:

vCard is NOT W3C’s standard. It belongs to the IETF. The W3C documents are
convenient mappings of that IETF design/schema/vocabulary into RDF’s data
model. Adding imagined terms into RDF applications using it

The FOAF offer was to put a simple subset isomophic to full vCard in
somewhere friendly and updatable, whereas adding something into a spec
labelled vCard but maintained at W3C looks to the whole world as if the Web
Consortium has forked another standards org’s spec and added new things
without liaison or coordination (eg on LDAP and XML Schema representations).

Cheers

Dan


On Fri, Mar 14, 2025 at 09:43 Peter Rivett <
pete.rivett@federatedknowledge.com> wrote:

> 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> 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
>