From Business Cards to Structured Data: A Natural Evolution

The business card was the first attempt to standardize personal data exchange. Name, title, organization, contact. A minimal schema, printed on cardstock, passed between people at the moment of introduction.

The curriculum vitae extended this. Chronological structure, categorical sections, a conventional ordering of information. Readers developed heuristics for parsing it quickly. The format itself became a signal: someone who could produce a coherent CV had demonstrated a minimum level of organization.

LinkedIn added network topology: not just who you are, but who vouches for you and who you are connected to. The endorsement graph added a verification layer that the CV lacked.

The date-me doc went further. No fixed schema, but a deliberate attempt to communicate values, working styles, and relationship requirements — the attributes that are relevant to collaboration and partnership but absent from professional profiles.

PairGeek Schema is the formalization of that last step. It provides the schema that date-me docs lack, making the information machine-readable without removing the human-readable layer. The evolution is not disruption; it is a natural extension of a trajectory that has been running for decades.