Contact management in semantic web

One big idea we’ve had with OpenPsa has been supporting various standards and Microformats to make the user experience richer.

Today I finally had the chance to take the first step at this direction by adding web site probing support into the OpenPsa Contacts CRM component. Now when you enter a new person or company it does:

  • Check if the contact has a homepage set
  • Register an “at” entry for Midgard
  • Next minute the homepage will be fetched
  • If there is a <link /> to RSS feed that feed will be fetched
  • If the feed includes ICBM metadata the position will be stored accordingly
  • If the feed includes GeoRSS info then the a subscription will be registered
  • …and at every subscription run the person’s position will be updated according to the time of latest RSS entry

End result is that if the contact has a geocoded website (like many do nowadays), the position will be available for the CRM system.

It is of course only the first step. When finally I upgrade my local development box to run PHP5 I can start reading Microformats in via hKit and do cool things like automatically populating employees and contact information.


Read more Midgard posts.