There has been some talk around Attribute Type URI couple of months ago in OpenID mailing lists. Unless we define a set of widely agreed Type URIs, we will not be able to transfer attributes insuperably. Chris Messina’s summary document on various type URI is very helpful to compare these.
There however is one thing that these specs are missing. The Script types and the language.
Unlike most Western language, some language like Japanese have many scripts within itself. For example, we use “Kanji”, “Katakana”, “Hiragana”, “Romaji (alphabet)” as four distinctive scripts. Often, we are required to supply name and address both in Kanji and Katakana or Hiragana, because without Katakana or Hiragana, you really do not know how to pronounce the Kanji in many cases.
Thus, while it would probably suffice to express fullname just as
http://axschema.org/namePerson
in English, we need these in each scripts.
The problem is how to express these as Type URIs.
One obvious way of approaching it would be something like
http://axschema.org/namePerson#script_name/language_code
where script_name and language_code are optional.
For example,
http://axschema.org/namePerson#kanji
http://axschema.org/namePerson#katakana
would be the Kanji and Katakana version of the fullname.
If the default language for those were not specified, we could further qualify them as
http://axschema.org/namePerson#kanji/ja_JP
If there is only one script for the language, or if it does not matter, we could abbreviate like:
http://axschema.org/namePerson#/en_US
which is the same as
http://axschema.org/namePerson
if the default language was specified as en_US.
What would you think?