Overview

One important set of information is the personal profile which should be made portable e.g. betwen Social Networks. 

Profile information includes things like

• full name
• address
• email addresses
• homepage(s)
• interests
• profile photo(s)
• geolocation

and much more. This information needs to be portable between web sites.

We recommend to use hCard for this as it has the more complete dataset than e.g. FOAF. It might be considered though to allow both to be used.

Service Providers MUST therefor provide an hCard document for each user which then gets referenced in the Service Catalogue of that user. A profile can be protected as described in DP-REC-003 - Portable Data Authorisation.

Technology Purpose

hCard and FOAF are both accepted standards for marking up profile information. While both not being complete in what many social networks offer we expect work to happen in these areas to allow for more complete coverage. For now the information they provide.  More information on Microformats in general can be found in the Microformats wiki, more on hCard in detail here and here is the FOAF specification.

Selection Rationale

hCard has the advantage of a more complete profile information set over FOAF. It is also an accepted standard in this field. We probably need to add more formats for more information though. 

Details of Adoption

Forming a vital component of the final approval process, this section should detail implementations that have adopted the technology, and therefore are showing that the technology has real-world applications and acceptance. 

Action Group Backing 

Members of the action groups that back this technology should be listed here, as a formal tracking of support for the recommendation.