Feature announcement: vCard

[Markus Krötzsch-2]

Hi all,

SMW now has support for exporting data in vCard format, thus letting you
import contacts easily from a wiki into your personal address book. This
feature works similar to RSS and iCalendar exports: a special format (vcard)
is used for semantic queries, and labels of printout statements are used to
describe how wiki properties should be used in the vCard export.

vCards should be especially useful in intranet wikis where a lot of personal
data is found. Sites like semanticweb.org often have only little personal
information. Yet you can see examples there, e.g. at
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/AIFB as well as on any person's page.

An example vCard query is as follows:

{{#ask: [[{{FULLPAGENAME}}]]
| format=vcard
| ?Affiliation=organization
| ?Email
| ?Foaf:phone=workphone
| ?Homepage
| searchlabel=vCard
}}

The labels (e.g. "email" or "organization") have a special predefined
relationship to vCard properties. SMW currently supports the following
labels:

email
organization
homepage
workphone
homephone
cellphone
firstname
lastname
birthday  (should by of Type:Date)
note  (can be anything, the query results are combined with "," and inserted
as free text)

These map to standard vCard fields in the obvious way. More fields could be
enabled if requested.

Cheers,

Markus

--
Markus Krötzsch
Semantic MediaWiki    http://semantic-mediawiki.org
http://korrekt.org    markus@...


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[Markus Krötzsch-2]

Update:

* Not all address book tools support vCard properly. Most notably, MS Outlook
is not able to import lists of many contacts at once (it only gets the first
contact in a list). Outlook is broken in this was at least up to 2007, later
versions were not tested yet. Outlook also sometimes has problems with
character encoding that were not observed with other tools.
* Mac Address Book, KDE Kontact, and Mozilla Thunderbird were reported to work
properly.
* Mac Address Book does not understand the vCard info "CLASS" (level of
confidentiality) and displays it as a note.
* Tools show different behaviour if you import the same contacts multiple
times. Every contact has an internal identifier, so tools can in principle
recognise that you already have that data. But some tools prefer to compare
names and suggest merging of contacts. Some just duplicate entries when you
import the some person anew.

We are interested in learning about the performance of other tools as well.
Feel free to drop us a line.


SMW's vCard support has been improved further:

* First and last name are now guessed if they are not given. This is useful
since some tools do not work well if these are not given. A "formatted name"
that is used for normal display in most tools is always given.
* In addition to the fields in my first mail, vCard now supports the following
printout fields:
 extraname (one or more "middle names")
 prefix (something like "Dr." or "Mr.")
 suffix (something like "jun.")
 name (formatted name used for display, default is the wiki page name)


Cheers,

Markus
 

On Montag, 23. Juni 2008, Markus Krötzsch wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> SMW now has support for exporting data in vCard format, thus letting you
> import contacts easily from a wiki into your personal address book. This
> feature works similar to RSS and iCalendar exports: a special format
> (vcard) is used for semantic queries, and labels of printout statements are
> used to describe how wiki properties should be used in the vCard export.
>
> vCards should be especially useful in intranet wikis where a lot of
> personal data is found. Sites like semanticweb.org often have only little
> personal information. Yet you can see examples there, e.g. at
> http://semanticweb.org/wiki/AIFB as well as on any person's page.
>
> An example vCard query is as follows:
>
> {{#ask: [[{{FULLPAGENAME}}]]
>
> | format=vcard
> | ?Affiliation=organization
> | ?Email
> | ?Foaf:phone=workphone
> | ?Homepage
> | searchlabel=vCard
>
> }}
>
> The labels (e.g. "email" or "organization") have a special predefined
> relationship to vCard properties. SMW currently supports the following
> labels:
>
> email
> organization
> homepage
> workphone
> homephone
> cellphone
> firstname
> lastname
> birthday  (should by of Type:Date)
> note  (can be anything, the query results are combined with "," and
> inserted as free text)
>
> These map to standard vCard fields in the obvious way. More fields could be
> enabled if requested.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Markus

--
Markus Krötzsch
Semantic MediaWiki    http://semantic-mediawiki.org
http://korrekt.org    markus@...


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Semediawiki-user@...
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-user