application/rdf+xml

Declarative Living: indicating the preferred contact channel

I have a first update to FOAF-EXT which is based on a comment by Richard Cyganiak, he suggested a more general way to indicate that something is my preferred way of contact/communication, a foafx:preferredMeansOfContact. So I have updated the FOAF EXTension ontology to have such a property, it is a boolean property and the suggested usage is to only use it with a value of true (to indicate that something is a preferredMeansOfContact).

Here is an example of its usage:


   <foaf:holdsAccount>
    <foaf:OnlineChatAccount>
     <foafx:preferredMeansOfContact
       rdf:datatype="&xsd;boolean">true
     </foafx:preferredMeansOfContact>
     <foaf:accountServiceHomepage
       rdf:resource="http://sipgate.de/"/>
     </foaf:accountServiceHomepage>
   <foaf:accountName>5554184@sipgate.de
     </foaf:accountName>
  </foaf:holdsAccount>

This should be read as “this online account (actually a sip account at some sip provider) is my preferred way to contact me”.

Using preferredMeansOfContact does not involve subclassing foaf:OnlineAccount so it may be omitted by consumers which only understand FOAF, in contrast foafx:PreferredOnlineAccount may be skipped by such consumers which results in data loss.


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