Name components (e.g. family name and given name) have been split into another document.

1. Use cases & requirements

The Person class should have properties for:

  1. name

    Mr. John Q. Public, Esq.

  2. alternate names

    To find a person by a pseudonym or nickname, e.g. “Mark Twain” for Samuel Clemens.

  3. former names

    If a councillor changes name, earlier council transcripts should continue to use the former name.

  4. identifiers

    Eric Cantor has the THOMAS identifier 01674.

  5. preferred email address

    To contact a representative via email.

  6. gender

    To measure the gender diversity of a group.

  7. personal pronouns

    To construct sentences containing personal pronouns, e.g. “John Doe will be at their constituency office next week.”

  8. date of birth

    To provide biographical detail, or to report a person’s age.

  9. date of death

    To determine whether a person is alive or dead, e.g. in order to disable the deceased’s contact form.

  10. head shot

    To identify the person visually.

  11. one-line biography

    To provide a brief biography.

  12. biography

    To provide a long form biography.

  13. national identity

    Nine members of the House of Peoples shall comprise a quorum, provided that at least three Bosniak, three Croat, and three Serb delegates are present.

  14. the means of contacting the person

    1 Main Street
    Anytown, USA
    555-555-0100
    [email protected]

  15. external links

    A representative’s Wikipedia page or official website.

2. Standard reuse

Briefly, the survey of existing specifications concludes that:

  • Only person:Person fits the data specification’s definition of a person.
  • person:birthName and PersonMaidenName are the only properties for former names.
  • Only facebook:bio describes biographies without importing the BIO vocabulary.

With respect to the choice of terms:

  • Many specifications use the same terms, including FOAF, Schema.org and RFC 6350 (vCard 4.0). FOAF and Schema.org terms are reused, given their breadth of adoption.
  • dcterms:alternative can be used for alternate names; vCard 4.0 instead can set a PREF parameter on names, to make one name preferred.
  • foaf:nick is frequently used for abbreviations, including IRC nicknames, and is therefore used for issued identifiers.

3. Classes and properties

Term Mapping Definition
Person person:Person A real person, alive or dead
name foaf:name A person's preferred full name
alternate name dcterms:alternative An alternate name, such as a pseudonym
former name opengov:otherName A former name, such as a maiden name
identifier foaf:nick An issued identifier, e.g. a Library of Congress Name Authority File number
email address1 schema:email2 A preferred email address
gender foaf:gender A gender
date of birth schema:birthDate3 A date of birth
date of death schema:deathDate A date of death
head shot schema:image4 A URL of a head shot
one-line biography bio:olb A one-line account of a person's life
biography bio:biography An extended account of a person's life
national identity opengov:nationalIdentity A national identity
contact detail opengov:contactDetail A means of contacting the person
external links rdfs:seeAlso A URL to a document about the person

1. Add additional email addresses as contact details, using the ContactDetail class.

2. schema:email is used instead of foaf:mbox, because email is a more familiar term than mbox.

3. schema:birthDate is used instead of foaf:birthday to match schema:deathDate, for which FOAF has no property.

4. schema:image is used instead of foaf:img, because abbreviations like img are avoided.

4. Serialization

JSON differences from other RDF serializations:

  • The former name and alternate name properties are serialized as a single other_names property, whose value is an array of name objects.
  • The term identifiers is used instead of nick and is serialized as an array of identifier objects.
  • The term summary5 is used instead of olb, because abbreviations are avoided.
  • The term links is used instead of seeAlso and is serialized as an array of link objects.

5. With respect to reuse, Drupal uses the term summary to describe a brief version of a long text.

5. Code lists

Gender

The following is a subset of vCard 4.0’s code list. Implementations may use values from outside this list to reflect the diversity of gender identities.

  • male
  • female