Weblog

Aug 31, 02:52 pm: What do you need to know about a missing person?

In a comment on Microformats and disaster relief, Chris Messina asked what, other than the things already specified in hCard would be needed to make it workable to mark up the unstructured missing person data that people put onto a variety of message boards after a disaster. The People Finder Interchange Format ”...which encompasses both a data model and an XML-based exchange format for sharing data about people who are missing or displaced by natural or human-made disasters.” The sample person entry person entry form provides a sample of the kind of info that needs to be marked up. Most is clearly defined in the hCard specifications. The status section, though, with fields for last known location, whether the person is missing or found and a the ability to enter temporary contact information is more specific to these instances.

So, if status (missing or found) and last known location are the only two missing fields, where should they go in the hCard format?

tagged: , , , ,

Marnie Webb  | 

Comments made

  1. John Allsopp

    Marnie,

    it’s quite ok for an hCard or other microfromat chunk to also have other content and HTML than that specific microformat. So, you could add the necessary extra info using the same approach as ufs, e.g.

    (sorry, escaped code examples get translated into HTML, but was going to put an example of an input with a type of checkbox, and a class of “status”)

    The last known location is a little trickier, as we’d like this to be structured, so adr is ideal, and you can have multiple adrs in an hCard, but the problem is giving it a type. The types of adrs are defined by vcard, and aree

    INTL, POSTAL, PARCEL, WORK, dom, home, pref

    so, none of these work specifically. I’m not sure the best way to go about adapting that – perhaps simply using your own type “lastseen”, which will of course cause parsers some problems – if you are usiing this inhouse mostly, it migth not cause such a big problem – but someone else shgould have some better thoughts on this

    You’ll also want to have a GEO if possible for the last known location, and you can just use the geo microformat inside an hCard for that.

    So, in short, extending hCard by adding non hCard HTML is completely fine. The challenge I see is properly using adr for the location of their last known whereabouts, within the vcard schema. But nothing insurmountable I’m sure

    HTH

    john


    Sep 1, 12:04 am