Hi, I'm coming across an increasing number of references to microformats and already do some work in the area of the Semantic Web so I'm trying to see the big picture of how it all fits together.
I've read a few introductory articles and faqs but still have some questions about how microformats fit together and work. When I first came across microformats I had the (mistaken) impression that they were a way for anyone to arbitrarily mark-up their data. After some more reading and a little contempltation I come to the (obvious) understanding that that couldn't really work - I mean, what good is a formatting your data in a format that only you can understand (I guess it might make some sense for large organisations but apart from that ...)? So my current understanding of microformats is that they are a new approach to adding meaning to the web by (lightly) tagging existing content (in XHTML) to add a semantic dimension to documents. The barrier to entry is pretty low because in a little of cases you can tag your existing content by simply adding some class attributes to your document, right? This contrasts with the semantic web where you need to take your data in its existing formats and create RDF from it. In terms of standards - is http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page#Specifications a definitive list of the microformats in use? If someone wants to introduce a new one is the approach described in - http://microformats.org/wiki/faq#Q:_When_should_I_use_a_microformat.3F_What_are_they_for.3F.22 the best way to approach things? I have a problem in mind but I'm not clear on whether microformats is the answer or not - but I guess its what initially prompted the search that brought me to microformats and it fits the notion in http://microformats.org/wiki/process of their having to be a "problem" to be solved. The problem in this case seems to me, to lend itself to a microformat. As a sysadmin for a small IT company, I regularly have to buy new equipment. Let's take laptops as a example. Typically, I come up with a set of criteria for the laptop I want e.g. (the following are some example criteria, not to be taken too seriously) 1. Must be a HP or an IBM 2. Must have a minimum of 512MB of RAM 3. Must have a Core Duo 2 processor. 4. Must have a minimum of 40GB of hard-drive 5. Must have a wifi card that supports 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g. 6. Must have a dedicated (not embedded graphics card). 7. Does it support Linux? So I take this info and I surf to the various manufacturers websites and try to narrow their list of models down to the list that meets my criteria (maybe ordered by price). I guess in most cases this info is already on manufacturers websites, but its certainly not amenable to scraping and parsing semantically (and maybe its not in the interests of the manfacturers to provide the information in a format that lets me easily compare them to other manufacturers) but it strikes me that if they did .. it would be really, really easy for me to go to all the major manufacturers websites, suck them their microformatted data and then analyse it off line - I see something like an openoffice datapilot table (microsoft excel pivot table) where I can click various filters to match my criteria above and sort the output according to something like price and voila, my choices are obvious - is there a microformat that lends itself to this sort of thing already. Is this the kind of scenario that microformats could meet or am I way off of the mark? I guess even if manufacturers didn't want to participate in this, there are lots of sites out there that review laptops - if you could get them to sign-up to this the microformatted information would become available quickly (all it would take is one person to review a laptop). Thoughts and comments welcome .. -stephen -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.skynet.ie/~stephen/ _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
