Net::OpenID::UserProfile

[Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon]

Brad Fitzpatrick <brad at danga.com> wrote:
> Mark Smith and I were discussing today a new module today, tentatively
> called Net::OpenID::UserProfile, which would take a VerifiedIdentity
> object from Net::OpenID::Consumer and use the foaf/maker/rss/atom data
> that it discovers and makes available, and then actually goes and crawls
> those resources (perhaps in some defined order of preference) to build a
> UserProfile object with things like email (or hash), name, nick, blog URL,
> etc.

Sounds like a good idea to me.  My own copy of helper.bml (which I've
turned into a standalone helper.pl) is hacked to do this:

	my $foaf=new XML::FOAF(new URI($vident->url));
	
	my $identity={
		url  => $vident->url,
		name => eval { $foaf->person->name } || '',
		nick => eval { $foaf->person->nick } || ''
	};
	
	my $eidentity = js_dumper($identity);

Unfortunately, XML::FOAF is a really heavy module; it depends on
Crypt::OpenPGP, which pulls in about twenty crypto modules, many of
which don't seem to install cleanly via the CPANPLUS shell.  (They
work fine with standard CPAN.pm for some reason.)

Actually, this sounds like a much larger idea than just OpenID.  A
module that takes an arbitrary URL, retrieves all the metadata
associated with it, and sets it up in a usable, format-agnostic form
would likely have applications elsewhere.  Suggested name:
WWW::Profile or WWW::AuthorProfile.

Possibly relevant CPAN modules:
    * XML::FOAF
    * WWW::Blog::Metadata
    * Text::vCard and Text::vCard::Addressbook
    * XML::Atom::Person (not well documented)

> Mark expressed some interest but has little time and isn't completely
> comfortable with pretending to be an authority in interpretting semantic
> XML data.  He might end up doing it, but he just said on AIM that he'd
> prefer to pass it off to somebody.

I seem to have a lot of the same constraints as Mr. Smith (little
knowledge of semantic protocols and limited time), so I don't think I
can tackle this, except in a secondary role.

-- 
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent at brentdax.com>
Perl and Parrot hacker