How to person-tag a post

Real world examples

When you post an article/note/photo (e.g. in Facebook or Buzz), you can tag it at the same time with specific people.  The people tagging/mentioning is NOT a separate activity from the user (or user interface) perspective, but rather, part of the activity of posting.

Thus the people-tags (person-tag) or mention must be an annotation on the object which is being posted. 

Test case example

In the FSW SWAT0, actor A takes a photo of actor B and tags that photo with B.

Brainstorm proposal

2010-258 by Tantek Çelik at Sep15-Meetup

Atom has an existing facility for annotating a post (entry) with a "tag" - category. 

Use the atom:category element to annotate a post with a person-tag as follows:

atom:category

 term: URI for the person

 scheme: "http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/person"

 label: formatted name of the person

Atom markup example

(based on example from SWAT0)

Inside the atom:entry element for the activity, you would have atom:category element as follows:

<category xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"

          term="http://tantek.com"

          scheme="http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/person"

          label="Tantek Çelik"/>

A parser can detect that this category is a person-tag by the specific scheme value being an ActivityStreams Person. The label attribute provides the user visible text to be displayed, and the term string provides a URI to hyperlink the visible text.

hAtom markup equivalent

The following microformats fragment inside an hAtom hentry can be automatically parsed and converted to the above-mentioned <category> element.

<span class="vcard">

 <a rel="tag" class="url fn" href="http://tantek.com/">

  Tantek Çelik

 </a>

</span>

The class name "vcard" on the span element implies an hCard (person or org, but given fn!=org here, it's a person)

The rel="tag" on a hyperlink which is also has the classname of "url" indicates that the person itself is a tag, and the href of that hyperlink is the term.

The classname of "fn" provides the label / display text for the person.

See also

• Events
• Sep15-Meetup
• 2010-09-15 Meetup Notes
• Person