hCard microformat, vCard, FOAF

September 12th, 2005

We already support exporting of profiles in the FOAF format, a great way of publishing information about yourself in a XML (technically RDF) format which is machine readable. When you create an account, you are given the option of importing a profile from your hard drive or another website providing it’s in the FOAF format. This will soon be available when you edit your profile and perhaps the system can automatically synchronize your profile between various websites using FOAF.

The vCard format is another way of publishing information. The reason why I chose to use FOAF over vCard was because FOAF is easily parsed and extended. vCard is very business orientated with elements such as address, telephone number and contact details. None of this information would be suitable for a forum system/community making FOAF a much better choice for profile syndication even though vCard is a lot more popular (vCard is around 15 times more popular according to a quick Google search)

There is, however, a microformat called hCard based very heavily on vCard. The amount of semantic information which I could sensibly publish in hCard was almost negligible (just nicknames and URL) but it was very quick and easy to implement. So, user profiles are now hCard enabled I don’t plan on implementing much more of vCard/hCard but there is certainly quite a bit of work in the FOAF arena - parsing, semantics, etc.