Moved these notes from the main ContentModel^? page... eventually this page will contain more plans for the Contact content model and related data modeling.

What is a Contact

A contact is currently a Content Item, but there was some intent at one point that a contact not be a Content Item. Contacts don't appear in mixed views as much as other items -- we do expect Mail, notes, events and tasks to be in a mixed view (like the view for a given project). Contacts are less likely to be in mixed views but some users will still do that anyway. The difference is that contacts are static, whereas emails, tasks and events are all process-oriented.

We might want to model the process-oriented items as "Process Items". These are the user's data (Content Items) that must be triaged, prioritized, finished. These are actionable things? Do these come into your world as something you do something about? These are more volatile.

OTOH, a contact content model is just data most of the time. We might want to model contacts as a kind of "data resource" rather than a process item... if there is even any usefulness to these concepts. At any rate, we agree that contacts are not nearly as volatile as are the events, tasks and emails that you handle during the short period where that thing is active and volatile, before they turn into archived static things like contacts.

Related Links

• ContactSchemaNotes -- notes on vCard and interoperability with PIM apps
• VCard specification
• VObject -- python vCard module

Comments about the Kind for Street Address, in Contacts

Question about the fields listed for Street Address. As background info I used to work for a company that managed data for direct mail (ugh!).

According to the US Post Office Postal Addressing Standards Pub28 there really is only a few fields required to store a mailing address:

• Attention Line - e.g. Jane Doe
• Recipient Line - e.g. Widgets-R-Us
• Delivery Address Line - e.g. 123 Any Street
• Secondary Address Unit Designator - e.g. Apt 12
• Last Line - e.g. Philadelphia PA 19123

The Last Line is commonly broken up into Country Code, Postal Code, Region and Municipality. A reference to an xml schema that is very concise is HR-XML Consortium Postal Address 1.2 Spec

The reason for me bringing this up is that the Street Address should really concern itself with the fields required for a postal address and any other information would go into the Contact item.

-- MikeT - 27 Feb 2004

Yup, our current model for Street Address is somewhat more complicated, with 8 string literals instead of 5 you list. Our model may be more complicated than it needs to be. We still need to figure out how much is enough. Our current model has four separate attributes for "locality", "region", "postal code", and "country", rather than one attribute for "last line". It might be that having the four separate attributes will help in doing some sorts of tasks, like having Chandler use the address info to guess about the calendar time zone of the person you're scheduling a meeting with. And having the separate attributes might make it easier to interoperate smoothly with vCard and other PIM apps, but I'm not sure. Hopefully our new interoperation experiments will shed some light on issues like this.

-- BrianDouglasSkinner - 01 Mar 2004

DonDwiggins also found this reference page about "international address formats": http://www.bitboost.com/ref/international-address-formats.html

-- BrianDouglasSkinner - 02 Mar 2004

I understand that the current model is somewhat more complicated - my reason for bringing the postal format up was that it is a Street Address in a simple/pure form. The other fields secondary to the Street Address but I understand they do need to be present. I was trying to break the item down to the minimum and was mentally adding the other items back onto it as they became justified in my mental model. (I realize that this is probably what you guys have already done on the design team.)

-- MikeT - 02 Mar 2004

-- LisaDusseault - 14 May 2004

Address is really a Moment-Interval. A Participant's address may change over time. An Address may also be associated with a Participant's role, rather then the participant.

-- JimNorman - 16 Mar 2005