Open data

From Crash at Mine Wiki

Exchanging profiles between Crash at Mine, BeWelcome and other hospitality exchange networks or even more social networks (e.g. BookCrossing) would be great. For Crash this encompasses export, and import. We are not talking about mass import of profiles from another website, we want to offer our members the possibility to import their profiles from other websites into Crash.

People should also be able to export their own data onto their own computer, cell phone, or another website. For this we can implement:

• FOAF
• microID
• XFN
• hCard

Contents 1 Importing profiles 1.1 Data structure 1.2 General idea 1.3 from CouchSurfing 1.4 from Hospitality Club 2 Exporting profile information 3 People interested in implementing 4 Related 5 Interesting discussions

[edit] Importing profiles

[edit] Data structure

Requirements:

• "non-intrusive" on BW profiles
• retain as much information as possible from the imported profile
  • description
  • languages
  • all possible friend information, comments, references

Data can be stored in a structure that contains information about friends. When new people sign up (or possibly once a week, or a day) we need to scan through the existing data to see if CS friends are already friends on BW.

[edit] General idea

• Verify the identity on the other network, see also reserving usernames
• Several strategies for actual import:
  1. user saves his profile page as HTML
  2. javascript importer, using bookmarklets, clickable links that can be dragged on your browser's bookmarks and that perform some action on the HTML page you are currently browsing (in our case, the action would be to send the data written in that page to a script on BW for consumption). Advantage: it is the user who decide to export the data and not some batch script.
  3. public profile: BW server can fetch the profile (possibly through tor)
  4. non-public profile: BW server could use an account on the network to fetch the information
  5. log in as the user from the BW server, user has to enter password (link to the actual code to show the passwords are not retained)

[edit] from CouchSurfing

Currently XFN is implemented.

[edit] from Hospitality Club

[edit] Exporting profile information

• FOAF
• vCard, hCard

[edit] People interested in implementing

• Template:Member
• Paolo Massa
• Template:Member

[edit] Related

• OpenID
• Reserving usernames

[edit] Interesting discussions

• import (just one message, as of 01:00, 31 May 2007 (CEST))
• which HC/CS data to use
• interconnecting the whole hospex com.- integrating hc/cs data into BeWelcome
• importing HC/CS comments
• conflicts between username of Hospex networks