org-contacts development

[Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

i use org-contacts as my primary system for contact
management. Consequently, i'd love to be able to make use of my
org-contacts data on my Android phone.

To that end, i recently wrote some code for MobileOrg-Android which adds
basic PROPERTIES drawer support:

https://github.com/matburt/mobileorg-android/pull/434

What i'd now like to do is to add support for transferring data back and
forth between my org-contacts file and the Contacts store on my
phone. The challenge is the mapping between these two systems.

For example, org-contacts provides only one EMAIL property, which can
contain multiple addresses separated by spaces, whereas Android's
ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email class is able to distinguish
between different addresses for different purposes:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/provider/ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Email.html

What would be useful would be an 'official', fleshed-out spec for
org-contacts data, which handles a greater range of contact-related
info. At the moment, for example, my org-contacts file makes use of the
properties:

#+PROPERTY: LANDLINE
#+PROPERTY: MOBILE
#+PROPERTY: POST
#+PROPERTY: RESIDENCE

A search of this list's archives for references to 'org-contacts':

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/cgi-bin/namazu.cgi?query=org-contacts&submit=Search!&idxname=emacs-orgmode&max=20&result=normal&sort=date%3Alate

suggests that org-contacts is something people are using heavily enough
that they're writing code, ad-hoc, to provide functionality they
require, e.g.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2013-11/msg00869.html

i'm wondering if it might now be appropriate for org-contacts to become
part of org-mode proper, rather than simply a contrib, to reduce
unnecessary duplication of efforts. i suspect that, at the moment, a
number of people interested in making use of org-contacts might be
reluctant to do so (or do so more heavily) because it's not an
'official' part of org-mode. Yet contacts management seems to me to be
functionality well within org-mode's remit.

Fleshing out an extended spec for org-contacts data could be part of the
process of making org-contacts a first-class citizen of org-mode, and
provide a more solid foundation on which people can build (and share)
the org-contacts functionality they're after. And in my own particular
case, it would greatly facilitate my work in org-contacts / Android
Contacts integration. :-)

What do people think?


Alexis.