I'm not a botanist, so i don't know all the intricacy of plants, but as with all new microformats it is suggested that you get examples from other sites and how they "describe" plants. These means that you will need to collect what properties other sites use such as, TYPE, WEATHER, WATER, AMOUNT OF SUNLIGHT, etc. Then you will need to also get HOW they describe each attribute, for example AMOUNT OF SUNLIGHT, is this it in hours, seasons, is it "shade" "no shade" "direct sun", etc?
That should be your first task. If you can't find any data online, then it begs the question of usefulness, but I don't want to discourage you from looking. The nice thing about microformats is that we can constantly iterate. We don't need to sit for years to make a perfect system no one uses, we want to look at how the community at large is working and try to make things easier for already published data. In the same vein as classification of plants, we might want to explore making a simple microformat that mimics the classification system of the taxonomy of organizims. Kingdom->Phylum->...Family->Species. That way additional microformats (such as this plant idea) can use something like <abbr title="homosapien" class="species">Human</abbr> to uniquely identify data that can be cross-references in different databases. Any thoughts? -brian On 3/23/06, Scott Reynen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mar 23, 2006, at 3:43 PM, Paul Bryson wrote: > > >> but it doesn't have the major problem of identification with the > >> latin > >> terms acting as unique IDs. > > > > Is there any page that discusses the potential issues of using IDs in > > microformats? > > Oh, I didn't mean ID attributes - just something to uniquely identify > plants. All plants have a unique latin name, so if two people > discuss the same plant, it's easy to identify that they're both the > same. It's much more complicated with products, because different > systems use different identifiers (bar codes, serial numbers, ISBN, > VIN, etc.), which can overlap. It's clear what <span class="latin- > name">Erysimum Cheiri</span> means because there is only one > "Erysimum Cheiri" in the plant world. It's less clear what <span > class="id">Q7639R087</span> means, because the meaning is very > dependent on context. > > Peace, > Scott > > _______________________________________________ > microformats-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss > -- brian suda http://suda.co.uk _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
