helping opensocial play nice with open formats

[Paul Lindner]

Hi,

I'm working on the OpenSocial implementation for hi5 and I'd like to
get some feedback from the FOAF/XFN/Microformats experts here.

The hi5 implementation of OpenSocial currently fetches our existing
FOAF files to fulfill Opensocial requests for Profile data and Friends
data.

However 0.7 introduces a much richer set of fields that we'll need to
handle. You can see a list of them here:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/docs/0.7/reference/opensocial.Person.Field.html

Before I go off writing my own xml schema to encapsulate these I'd
appreciate pointers to any existing schemas in use for the same set of
data.

If not, then I'd be happy to hear from anyone who would like to help
me design the appropriate set of extensions to support these fields.

Regards,
Paul

--
Paul Lindner
hi5 Architect
plin...@hi5.com

[Julian Bond]

Paul Lindner <plin...@hi5.com> Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:26:12

Eurgh! This looks to me like The Google design for the profile attribute
schema is based on "what Orkut does". Understandable, but horrible.

This is all part of the 0.7 gadget spec, right? Has there been any word
about the Data APIs? I've been thinking that the Data APIs are much more
important to DP. And I guess we can expect the Data APIs to follow the
same route and expand out the People Data part.

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/docs/dataapis.html

Profile Data schemas are a mess as there's too many different sets. My
feeling is that the base really ought to be vCard since that's the
closest we have to a usable RFC based standard. And it's both the basis
for hCard and commonly used in FOAF as a namespace extension.

So to answer your question, one way of doing this would be to map
OpenSocial's people attributes to FOAF+VCard and then take what's left
over and create a namespace for it. And to feed all that back to the
OpenSocial groups, encouraging Google to own the extension namespace.

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