Re: vcard:AddressBook

Hi all,

unmaintained vocabularies are not a good thing, so generally speaking, I 
think it would be great if a Community Group took over the maintenance 
of this vocabulary (rdf-dev, rdf-maintenance, or solid are all good 
candidates IMO), and I'm happy to act as an interface with the W3C team 
to help with this.

That being said, I wholeheartedly agree with what Dan wrote below. I 
think that the value of the `vcard:` vocabulary is that it maps to a 
largely used standard (as also pointed out by Tim [1]). Adding features 
in the `vcard:` namespace that do not reflect what's in the IETF VCARD 
format is sending a bad signal.

And that's not even needed! The good thing about RDF is that we can mix 
and match vocabularies, so if the concept of `AddressBook` is not 
present in the VCARD format, an IRI can be minted for it in a 
/different/ vocabulary (e.g. FOAF), to be used together with terms from 
the `vcard:` vocabulary...


Now, that being said, if there is a legacy of data and/or applications 
out there that use `vcard:AddressBook`, despite the fact that it was not 
part of the original vocabulary... /maybe/ the pragmatic way to do is 
probably to add it to the `vcard:` vocabulary. But it should then be 
acknowledged that this term is a "historical anomaly" rather than an 
W3C-specific fork of the VCARD standard.

    pa

[1] https://github.com/solid/contacts/issues/8#issuecomment-2719050285
[2] https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/BagOfChips.html

On 14/03/2025 11:10, Dan Brickley wrote:
>
> (Copying
> mailto:resnick@episteme.net <mailto: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
>