Brian, if you look at the wiki, it would seem that he already has done
much of what you list.
I'm with you so far as defining the simpler microformat first for the
Latin classification system.
My thought is that it's a very specific microformat, which sort of bucks
the trend of very broadly applicable microformats thus far defined and
set as "official" specifications on microformats.org.
My suggestion is, a plant microformat does not necessarily require the
endorsement of microformats.org. If one desires to propose a new format
for something, it is much easier to build support if there are already
tools available which can make use of it. That is, make the plant
information aggregator *first*, /then/ market the format. This is part
of the reason why I believe hCalendar and hCard have gained such wide
adoption, as there is already x2v, the relevant creator applets, and the
wide range of existing applications which could already make use of
vcard and icalendar files produced from x2v.
However, a species classification microformat would fit right in with
the other broadly applicable microformats on microformats.org.
Brian Suda wrote:
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
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