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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[Sergey Chernyshev-3]

Markus,

Great, I think it's quite useful for all people-oriented wikis. I tried to get AIFBs cards into my Outlook, but it only loaded one card with AIFB as name and ignored the rest.

In any case, it looks like many people realize that moving towards structured data should be on both RDF and non-RDF directions.

So I want to raise a question regarding various other ways to express data on SMW instance. We already talked about RDFa - not with vCard comes a question about Microformats, e.g. hCard, hCalendar and so on.

Our Semantic Ready Validator tests for various kinds of structured data including Microformats - it's be great if we can have check mark next to Microformats on AIFB page: http://www.semanticready.com/are_you_ready?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsemanticweb.org%2Fwiki%2FAIFB

What do you think it might involve? Should we integrate it into SMW or use some other extensions on presentation layer to assign rels and classes to divs and spans?

       Sergey

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Markus Krötzsch <markus@...> 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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[Markus Krötzsch-2]

On Montag, 23. Juni 2008, Sergey Chernyshev wrote:
> Markus,
>
> Great, I think it's quite useful for all people-oriented wikis. I tried to
> get AIFBs cards into my Outlook, but it only loaded one card with AIFB as
> name and ignored the rest.

Of course, with different address book tools, your mileage may vary ... I have
also heard that Outlook does not support files with more than one vCard
entry. I fear there is nothing we can do (other than change the tool or file
a feature request with the tool vendor). Mac's Apple Address Book and KDE's
Kontact have had no problems with importing many people from one file. I
would like to learn about further experiences with other tools.

Another issue currently is that the vCards do have a full name (the one used
for display), but empty entries for first and last name (since we do not have
those in the wiki). Some tools may prefer if we would leave the empty entries
away completely.

>
> In any case, it looks like many people realize that moving towards
> structured data should be on both RDF and non-RDF directions.

Yes, certainly. RDF is a general purpose data format, while special purposes
have more specific formats. Once you have semantics, you can easily use many
syntactic forms as needed.

>
> So I want to raise a question regarding various other ways to express data
> on SMW instance. We already talked about RDFa - not with vCard comes a
> question about Microformats, e.g. hCard, hCalendar and so on.

Microformats and RDFa usually want to be embedded into (X)HTML, while our
current exports are all links to download files. Embedding would require some
more (e.g. you could not use hCard µ-Format without having all the contact
data being really present in the wiki page).

>
> Our Semantic Ready Validator tests for various kinds of structured data
> including Microformats - it's be great if we can have check mark next to
> Microformats on AIFB page:
> http://www.semanticready.com/are_you_ready?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsemanticweb.org
>%2Fwiki%2FAIFB

Interesting tool. So being most "ready" means to have all possible export
formats on one page? ;-)

>
> What do you think it might involve? Should we integrate it into SMW or use
> some other extensions on presentation layer to assign rels and classes to
> divs and spans?

Well, if it seems useful and feasible to you, then we can try to support that.
We generally aim at having all formatting extensions as modular as possible.
For example, iCalendar and vCard are just single files that create all the
output, and which could be left away to get a smaller SMW distribution. More
types of query formats can be added along this architecture easily (e.g. CSV,
RDF or JSON).

One would need to think about the process for getting microformats/RDFa into a
wiki page, so that it can also be so modular.


Markus

>
>        Sergey
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Markus Krötzsch <
>
> markus@...> 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@...

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


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[Markus Krötzsch-2]

On Dienstag, 24. Juni 2008, Markus Krötzsch wrote:
> On Montag, 23. Juni 2008, Sergey Chernyshev wrote:
> > Markus,
> >
> > Great, I think it's quite useful for all people-oriented wikis. I tried
> > to get AIFBs cards into my Outlook, but it only loaded one card with AIFB
> > as name and ignored the rest.

Some minor updates:

>
> Of course, with different address book tools, your mileage may vary ... I
> have also heard that Outlook does not support files with more than one
> vCard entry. I fear there is nothing we can do (other than change the tool
> or file a feature request with the tool vendor). Mac's Apple Address Book
> and KDE's Kontact have had no problems with importing many people from one
> file. I would like to learn about further experiences with other tools.

Mozilla Thunderbird also appears to work properly.

>
> Another issue currently is that the vCards do have a full name (the one
> used for display), but empty entries for first and last name (since we do
> not have those in the wiki). Some tools may prefer if we would leave the
> empty entries away completely.

I have updated the code to "guess" first and last names if none are given. The
data as such is mandatory for vCard 3.0, so we cannot omit the name parts if
not available.

-- Markus

>
> > In any case, it looks like many people realize that moving towards
> > structured data should be on both RDF and non-RDF directions.
>
> Yes, certainly. RDF is a general purpose data format, while special
> purposes have more specific formats. Once you have semantics, you can
> easily use many syntactic forms as needed.
>
> > So I want to raise a question regarding various other ways to express
> > data on SMW instance. We already talked about RDFa - not with vCard comes
> > a question about Microformats, e.g. hCard, hCalendar and so on.
>
> Microformats and RDFa usually want to be embedded into (X)HTML, while our
> current exports are all links to download files. Embedding would require
> some more (e.g. you could not use hCard µ-Format without having all the
> contact data being really present in the wiki page).
>
> > Our Semantic Ready Validator tests for various kinds of structured data
> > including Microformats - it's be great if we can have check mark next to
> > Microformats on AIFB page:
> > http://www.semanticready.com/are_you_ready?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsemanticweb.o
> >rg %2Fwiki%2FAIFB
>
> Interesting tool. So being most "ready" means to have all possible export
> formats on one page? ;-)
>
> > What do you think it might involve? Should we integrate it into SMW or
> > use some other extensions on presentation layer to assign rels and
> > classes to divs and spans?
>
> Well, if it seems useful and feasible to you, then we can try to support
> that. We generally aim at having all formatting extensions as modular as
> possible. For example, iCalendar and vCard are just single files that
> create all the output, and which could be left away to get a smaller SMW
> distribution. More types of query formats can be added along this
> architecture easily (e.g. CSV, RDF or JSON).
>
> One would need to think about the process for getting microformats/RDFa
> into a wiki page, so that it can also be so modular.
>
>
> Markus
>
> >        Sergey
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Markus Krötzsch <
> >
> > markus@...> 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@...

--
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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