On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Pete Johnston wrote:

> > I disagree with this (still) - there was no response to my
> > email responding to you when you raised this the last time.
> >
> > Use the 'N' 'Additional Names' component, but with empty
> > Family and Given names:
> >
> > <![CDATA[BEGIN:VCARD
> > FN:University of Oxford
> > N:;;University of Oxford
> > ORG:University of Oxford
> > END:VCARD]]>
> >
> > Although perhaps not IMC's original intent, it is my belief
> > that such a structure technically *does* comply with stated
> > vCard rules.
>
> It may be structurally compliant, but (as Andy pointed out in the
> previous thread) the abstract and overview of RFC2426 do state that
> clearly that vCard provides "information for... a person object".
>
> The purpose of the FN attribute is "to specify the formatted text
> corresponding to the name of the object the vCard represents".
>
> Following the vCard spec, this seems to imply that we should conclude
> that the object with the name "University of Oxford" is a person.

Pete,
I think you are right in your interpretation of this.  On the other
hand... I agree with Chris that the only other solution to this problem
seems to be to roll our own format for organisational names - which, as he
pointed out, isn't likely to lead to much greater interoperability anyway.

I'm wondering... given that we are talking about a 'closed world' solution
here, i.e. the closed world of everyone who implements LOM :-), it may be
that we *can* afford to define our own interpretation of the vCard spec?
Provided we have agreement within the world about what to do at the edges
of the world we should be OK.  What I mean by that is that we need to try
and ensure that all implementers of LOM understand that when they take a
vCard record from within LOM in order to expose it in some other, non-LOM
environment, they should discard any vCards that describe organisations
(because such vCards will not have any general meaning outside of LOM).
Does that make sense?

What we are really doing is inventing our own (fairly closed) profile of
vCard.

We need two things to happen...

1) agree a clear set of rules about how to use vCard to describe
organisations in such a way that there is no room for confusion with uses
of vCard to describe people that only carry partial information.

2) achieve some level of agreement across all implementors of LOM that
this is how things are going to be done.

So... what is the rule or set of rules that tells me that

<![CDATA[BEGIN:VCARD
FN:University of Oxford
N:;;University of Oxford
ORG:University of Oxford
END:VCARD]]>

represents an organisation rather than a person?  I think that it is
something like

- given name and family name in the N element are blank AND
- the FN element, the 'Additional Names' field in the N element and the
  ORG element are all the same.

An (admitedly extreme) example where rules like this break down, would be
the case of the person known as 'WH Smith' who works for the organisation
called 'WH Smith' where the cataloguer doesn't know the family name and
given name, which could result in

<![CDATA[BEGIN:VCARD
FN:WH Smith
N:;;WH Smith
ORG:WH Smith
END:VCARD]]>

A perfectly acceptable person vCard, but one that might also represent WH
Smith the organisation according to the rules above.

Although I think we can live with this level of confusion :-) , I wonder
if we could make use of NOTE in some way, to make it clear that we are
describing an organisation, e.g.

<![CDATA[BEGIN:VCARD
FN:WH Smith
N:;;WH Smith
ORG:WH Smith
NOTE:objectClass\: organization
END:VCARD]]>

For UK readers, note US spelling of organization - the point being that
we want software to be able to process this, therefore we need to be
consistent about how the NOTE field is going to be used.  The string

objectClass: organization

is taken from LDAP (but the colon needs to be correctly escaped within the
vCard).  I don't see much chance that this string will used to mean
anything else - hence I think there is almost no possibility for confusion
and mis-understanding between systems with this approach.

Finally, if we are going to use NOTE in this way, then I wonder if we
really need to repeat the organisation's name in multiple fields.  It
would be simpler to reduce to

<![CDATA[BEGIN:VCARD
ORG:WH Smith
NOTE:objectClass\: organization
END:VCARD]]>

Oh... and, since we are now firmly talking about a LOM-specific profile of
vCard, I guess we can forget about the fact that VERSION is mandatory?

Andy
--
Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell       +44 1225 383933
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