[uf-discuss] OpenID, Profile URIs and GRDDL

[Danny Ayers]

I just ran across a blogosphere thread starting somewhere around:

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/11/01/hcard-for-openid-simple-registration-and-attribute-exchange/
through
http://willnorris.com/2007/11/hcard-is-not-a-provisioning-engine-for-private-data

- which turns into concrete proposals on Tantek's blog. I'd like to
comment specifically on this:
[[
Modest proposal 3, in two parts:

   1. Let's host the "official" "latest" hCard XMDP profile at
http://microformats.org/profile/hcard
   2. Let's create a set of HTTP redirects for appended /propertynames,
]]
http://tantek.com/log/2007/11.html#d02t2318

Great! This is much more useful for interop than having to use Wiki
page URLs as profile URIs, especially since they're not much good for
machine-reading (I know 'people first' but computers need a little
help putting them first...).

There's already a hCard XMDP profile in place at
http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard, which might be a possible alternative
URI to http://microformats.org/profile/hcard, though I doubt whether
much would break with a redirect on one end or the other.

I'd also like to propose (again) that *all* the established
microformats get more useful profile URIs, with XMDP documents and
appropriate data-view linkage to support GRDDL on the microformat. A
lot of these documents have already been prepared ready to deploy
(I've done a couple myself), the only problem having been no
microformats.org-approved locations for them.

In the same way that hCard can be reused with OpenID, with profiles in
place all the microformats can be reused with Semantic Web
technologies with no extra cost to any publisher who is already
following known best practices. Similarly, with profile URIs in place
it's straightforward to produce quality microformat documents from
RDF-modelled systems (e.g. see
http://dannyayers.com/2007/11/04/foaf-sample-data-and  -although I
won't guarantee the quality there...).

Speaking of best practices, maybe now would be a good time to say
again that it would be good Web etiquette for the microformats
community to encourage the use of HTML meta data profile URIs (through
specification and leading-by-example), rather than claiming a set of
short strings as their own.

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

(btw, there are quite a few systems around which allow mapping between
LDAP and RDF which should allow good integration between traditional
ID provision and hCard)

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 

http://dannyayers.com