If you haven’t guessed it already, we love data in open formats. Good quality, easily accessible data makes our lives easier, and causes children across the nation to beam with joy at the idea that they won’t have to copy a table from a Word document buried in a Zip file attached to an email.
In a continued drive to making all our data 5-star quality, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve made a few improvements to our Staff Directory beta. In addition to getting hold of people’s profiles in HTML using your browser (for example, see mine) you can now request them in three other delicious formats: JSON, RDF/XML and vCard.
The first two, JSON and RDF/XML will make the developers amongst you über happy. You can request them either by slinging appropriate http-accept headers to the usual URI for a person (http://lncn.eu/me/{account_name} is the canonical one), where application/json or application/rdf+xml will get you what you desire. Alternatively, you can hit up http://lncn.eu/me/{account_name}.json or http://lncn.eu/me/{account_name}.xml for the same thing.
The vCard format is of more interest to all, and provides a stupidly easy way to get a person’s details into your address book. By visiting http://lncn.eu/me/{account_name}.vcf (or by clicking the link at the bottom of any Directory profile) you’ll be given that person’s vCard, presenting their name, job title and contact details all in the industry standard machine readable format. It’s literally a matter of one or two clicks (or taps) to get information from the Directory into your computer’s (or phone’s) address book. If you want, you can download mine to see what I mean.