Standard people

[prog]

Current tech hunt: finding a standard, or at least standard-ish, way to represent a person or an organization in an XML document. I hate having to re-re-re-re-re-invent a "person"-type element every time I come up with a new schema (which, you may infer, is something I'm doing today for ICCB). But while there's been a good standard for representing the origins and qualifications of authored resources for years (the Dublin Core), there doesn't seem to be any equivalent for people-pointers.

The nearest mark I've hit so far is a W3C note on representing vCards as RDF. vCards seem to be the market-winning technology, and they're not as flexible as I need, but I might be able to make them work for the nonce. Still, I'd love to hear if any of y'all have further insight.

Comments

[daerr.livejournal.com]

FOAF has a person data type and is RDF based.
It's explicitly intended for people pointers.

http://www.foaf-project.org/

[prog.livejournal.com]

I saw that too, but at first glance it seemed too geared towards social networks specifically to be appropriate to a scientific-metadata context.

I've been reading up on RDF in general all day today, that said. It's something I haven't really had a deep knowledge of before. I may return for another look at FOAF when I'm done... I've already seen DC in a new (and useful) light.

HR-XML

[(Anonymous)]

This might help a little:
http://www.hr-xml.org/channels/projects_main.cfm

They have broken down common HR information into individual schemas. Might not be exactly what you want, but it could be a good starting point.

Shawn