The W3C is pleased to receive the Representing vCard Objects in RDF submission edited by Renato Iannella from NICTA, and notes this submission is the product of a long-standing collective effort from the wider Semantic Web community.
This submission updates an earlier member submission, Representing vCard Objects in RDF/XML. This update is necessary as the original vCard member submission, one of the earliest vocabularies created by RDF, was found by some users to be difficult to deploy. This led to Norm Walsh and others creating an easy-to-use syntax, An ontology for vCards for the purpose of creating an easy-to-use mapping of the popular hCard microformat. However, this ontology was not given proper review or W3C status, and it was difficult to express many of the more complex vCard constructions using this language, even though in its most basic form it was deployed by applications like Yahoo! SearchMonkey. Furthermore, the existence of two distinct and conflicting specifications for expressing vCard in RDF left end-users in considerable confusion.
Therefore we congratulate Renato Iannella for unifying the previous version of Representing vCard Objects in RDF/XML with An ontology for vCards in this update to his original member submission. To ensure that developers can easily find the latest specification, the URI of the previous submission has been re-used. We are aware that this particular specification has had over a year of review in the Semantic Web Interest Group and the Social Web Incubator Group, and has gone through review in a face-to-face meeting at the European Semantic Web conference in 2009 and additional review on the "Pedantic Web" mailing list. To our knowledge, Renato Iannella has carefully addressed every comment, including many from the W3C Team.
The most difficult part of the specification was specifying these two particular issues:
This latest version of vCard in RDF relates to the following W3C Activities and Groups:
As of today, W3C has no plans to take up recommendation-track work based on this Member Submission. We are aware that there are considerable changes in this space, including the development of vCard 4.0 by the IETF and the ongoing deployment of Portable Contacts and the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) ontology. We hope that the extensible nature of RDF as used in this member submission allows these various formats and versions to interoperate, and that the the necessary updates can be made in the context of the Semantic Web Interest Group and future Working Group. We expect there may be concrete recommendations for the future standardization in the final report of the Social Web.
We encourage people interested by this work to discuss on the semantic-web@w3.org Mailing List [public archive] and the public-xg-socialweb@w3.org the Social Web Incubator Group Mailing List [public archive] .
Harry Halpin, RDB2RDF Staff Contact, Social Web W3C Fellow <hhalpin@w3.org>,