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Which vCard properties to use to describe contact information?
- E.g. name, e-mail, telephone
Implementers have noted that DCAT-AP lacks detail for the descriptive elements to be used with the class vcard:Kind, the range of dcat:contactPoint. It currently does not specify any recommended properties, which means that applications do not know beforehand which properties may be encountered.
A common approach to the minimum set of properties to be used would increase interoperability.
This issue has been reported by Matthias Palmer:
http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/mailman/archives/dcat_application_profile/2016-January/000356.html
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The DCAT-AP specification is silent on which properties to use which puts a large burden on aggregators as they will have to recognise all of the possible properties defined in vCard, or make a best guess on what data publishers will provide.
In a related project, ADMS-AP for harvesting descriptions of interoperability assets by the Joinup platform, the following set of properties are specified:
One mandatory property, repeatable
Four optional properties, repeatable
Would these properties be relevant for Datasets?
+1 for vcard:hasEmail
If I recall correctly, the vCard/RDF spec itself mandates the use of vcard:fn
You are right. The vCard specification says that fn is the only mandatory property (https://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf/#Identification_Properties) so this should be in the guidelines.
Proposed resolution:
Just to mention that GeoDCAT-AP, based on how this information is specified in ISO 19115 / INSPIRE metadata, uses the following properties for vcard:Kind:
Likewise, for foaf:Agent, GeoDCAT-AP uses the following properties:
See also Uwe's comment on issue MI5.
vCard specifies that the property v:fn is mandatory for all Kinds. That's why the guideline here recommends that. It seems to me that if you provide v:organisation-name, you would also have to provide v:fn to satisfy this obligation in the W3C spec, correct?
vCard specifies that the property v:fn is mandatory for all Kinds. That's why the guideline here recommends that. It seems to me that if you provide v:organisation-name, you would also have to provide v:fn to satisfy this obligation in the W3C spec, correct?
Yes, Makx, you're right. In GeoDCAT-AP the focus was on the organisation name, since this is what is typically included in INSPIRE / ISO records. We can consider addressing this issue in the GeoDCAT-AP XSLT.
Said that, personally I think that the most relevant information for a dataset contact point is (1) an email address or (2) the Website URL. I don't need to know the name of an individual or organisation (and I don't need to know their postal address): the important thing is that I'm able to contact the relevant people / team / organisation.
We support the the suggestion to provide as a minimum name (v:fn) and e-mail address (v:hasEmail), and optionally telephone number (v:hasTel) and URL (v:hasURL)
Jean on the behalf of OP/OpenDataPortal