Hello! My group is putting together a system specification, called "IPORR", that works like this:
1. A webmaster (or other person editing HTML content) puts hReviews on his website that have a few extra requirements for their formatting beyond what hReview specifies. 2. The webmaster notifies us that he has these IPORR-friendly hReviews on his site. 3. We crawl the website, generate an index to hReviews, and make that index publicly accessible through a REST interface. 4. People come to our website where the available hReview sources are categorized and choose the ones they like. 5. Those people's mobile devices are configured to listen to the chosen hReview sources. 6. When the people are out shopping, they scan barcodes for products in which they interested. 7. hReviews from chosen sources download from the internet and onto their mobile devices, giving them immediate advice on spending decisions. I've completed instructions for the webmaster to use in publishing an IPORR-friendly hReview. They can be found at this URL: http://ethicalspender.org/articles/howtopublishyourreviews You might be wary of an "embrace and extend" tactic creating lots of nasty, incompatible hReview mutants. But keep in mind we are just adding extra restrictions for what our system would accept, so any "IPORR" hReview is 100% compatible with the hReview spec. To summarize what makes an hReview usable for IPORR: * The "item info" field is limited to identifying a product or organization. A product is identified with a GTIN URN. An organization (business, nonprofit, governmental) is identified with a website URL. The idea is to narrow down the number of ways the target of the rating can be identified so that it is practical to perform lookups. This is done so that we can match one or more hReviews to the digits pulled from a product's barcode scan. * The "type" field is either "product" or "url". * The "rating" field is required, and some rough guidelines are given for normalizing the numeric value. This is required because the intended applications will need to provide a single indicator of whether a consumer should buy something or not--a number between 1 and 5 shown on a tiny screen. Or maybe the consumer doesn't even look at the screen and he just hears an audio cue. * The "dtreviewed" field is required. With hReviews affected people's buying decisions so directly, it becomes more important to limit the influence of obsolete information. * The "summary" field is a brief justification for the value of the numeric "rating" field. * The "description" field is a more complete explanation of the numeric "rating" field. I would sincerely appreciate any feedback, particularly if I'm not promoting good use of the hReview format. It would be better to work out the kinks in my publishing instructions now than to have a bunch of people making hReviews in a way that needs to be corrected later. I'm happy to discuss any aspect of what we're doing as well. This is not a promote-and-run post--I'll be checking back for responses and reply on the list. -Erik Hermansen President, Ethical Spender [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ethicalspender.org _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
