Re: vcard:AddressBook

On Fri, Mar 14, 2025 at 19:45 Pete Resnick <resnick@episteme.net> wrote:

> I'm not entirely clear on what info Dan was looking for from me (the VCARD
> Working Group completed its work quite some time ago), but I can say that
> the IETF continues to maintain the vCard spec (
> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6350), and now has jCard (
> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7095.html) and JSContact (
> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9553.html), both of which were produced
> in the CALEXT WG and might be of interest).
>
> Let me know if you were looking for something more.
>
>
Thanks, those look useful and relevant. I mostly wanted to at least flag to
you that this has been a topic that keeps popping up in discussions around
W3C, going back before
https://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-vcard-rdf-20010222/ to 1999.

Would there be any interest in IETF for feedback from the RDF mapping work
and possibly term additions and tweaks to be communicated back to  the
maintenance process?

Also… if the W3C community’s RDF representation of vCard were to also
include a few terms that were not (yet? ever?) officially part of vCard
proper but which were found valuable here, could it still be acceptable to
IETF folk for it to show up in data prefixed eg like
vcard:SomethingSomething? So long as its status were made clear in
associated documentation and code, and the thinking / usecase shared back
with vcard maintainers.

I don’t want to drown your mailbox in details here - feel free to mute the
thread or whatever.

Cheers

Dan

> pr
> --
> Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
> All connections to the world are tenuous at best
>
> On 14 Mar 2025, at 3:10, Dan Brickley wrote:
>
>
> (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
>>
>