Cyrus is running through related standards.
Liberty Alliance has an ID_SIS Contact Book Service. Uses XML abstraction of vCard and XPATH-based queries. Web services infrastructure used for the service itself. Liberty also has a people profile.
OASIS: CIQ (Customer Information Quality) Defines XML based formats for names, addresses, and relationships. Doesn’t have any direct correspondence with vCard. Has a much richer format for mailing address information and relationships between different contacts.
LDAP – well established directory service application protocol. Used for much more than just contact information. Uses a “tree” model for relationships/boundaries. White Pages schema used for representing contacts. RFC2798 is a common one. Compared CardDAV to LDAP at the BOF in Chicago. COnclusion was that mapping vCard into LDAP is hard and you can’t get a good mapping – so it’s worthwhile to have a vCard-serving service.
hCard – 1-to01 mapping between vCard and semantic XHTML. Suitable for embedding in XHTML, Atom, RSS, and XML. One of several microformats.
CardDAV – WebDAV-based address book access protocol. Uses vCard as the data exchange format. Similar to CalDAV. Uses proven web technology to provide a low barrier to entry.
Jon Miner notes in the back channel that there’s a RDF vcard format at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf
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