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.
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Contact display widget for MidCOM
There are several places in OpenPsa where persons are displayed in some list: Search results, campaigns, buddy lists, project participants, etc. To make them more informative, I’ve now implemented a contact widget library that can be used anywhere in MidCOM.
Semantic web is here: Yahoo! and microformats
Semantic web, the platform that could enable new businesses to rival the likes of Google has for a long time been a distant promise. Much of this has been because the standardization bodies have focused on too difficult and impractical technologies instead of building it on top of existing web implementations. Microformats are a more pragmatic approach: by using simple...