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    10/1/2005

    Microformats and Structured Blogging

    I'm not sure I like these new microformats. The concept, from their site, goes as such:
     
    "Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards."
     
    The problem I see with some of their current formats is that the data really isn't structured in way that machines can take advantage of the information at all. For example, in the hReview (movie or book reviews) format, some key values aren't clearly defined -
     
    <div class="hreview">
    <span><span class="rating">5</span> out of 5 stars</span>
    <h4 class="summary"><span class="item fn">Crepes on Cole</span> is awesome</h4>
    <span>Reviewer: <span class="reviewer fn">Tantek</span> -
    <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050418T2300-0700">April 18, 2005</abbr></span>
    <blockquote class="description">
    Crepes on Cole is one of the best little creperies in San Francisco. Excellent food and service. Plenty of tables in a variety of sizes for parties large and small.  
    </blockquote>
    <p>Visit date: <span>April 2005</span></p>
    <p>Food eaten: <span>Florentine crepe</span></p>
    </div>

     
    The scale is a 1-5 scale, but there's no way for a machine to know this, so the scale can't be normalized with other reviews. The final rating is tagged, class="rating" but the scale isn't. 5 out of 5 stars. What if another hReview is published, but the author chooses to use a scale of 1 to 10. Expecting a machine to parse the 5 from "out of 5 stars" isn't acceptable. It seems most of the microformats suffer from this problem in some way. Human readable, sure, but the power of structured data in blogging is in the machines ability to index and compare similar data across large data sets.
     
    I prefer the much clearer approach taken by the guys at PubSub, who are working on a new set of xml schemas for this type of information. The have a web site up at structuredblogging.org. Here's the schema for their review format. Note the base and rating of the review, along with a great deal of other important information must be provided. IMO a smarter approach. Here's an example XML record of a review that can be embedded in HTML or an RSS feed:
     

    <!--

     the following is structured blog data for machine readers. -->
    <    subnode
        alternate-for-id="sbentry_1"
        xmlns:data-view="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view#"
        data-view:interpreter=http://structuredblogging.org/subnode-to-rdf-interpreter.xsl
        xmlns    =http://www.structuredblogging.org/xmlns#subnode>
        <    xml-structured-blog-entry xmlns="http://www.structuredblogging.org/xmlns"    >
            <    generator id="wpsb-1" type="x-wpsb-simple-review" version="1"    />
            <    simple-review version="1" xmlns="http://www.structuredblogging.org/xmlns#simple-review"    >
                <    review-title>Great Jam Band</review-title    >
                <    review-type>CD</review-type    >
                <    rating number="4" base="5" value="0.8">4 out of 5</rating    >
                <    product-name>Doin&#8217; Something</product-name    >
                <    product-link>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000059QYA?v=glance</product-link    >
                <    product-image-link>http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000059QYA.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg</product-image-link    >
                <    description type="text/html" escaped="true"    >
    Soulive is one of the great jam bands. They&#8217;re almost impossible to capture well on CD, but this disc comes the closest. I don&#8217;t really know what to call it: acid jazz, or just jazz, or trip-jazz, or something. It&#8217;s basically just a really good flow.     And there&#8217;s no singing (except for some guest vocals on a couple of tracks). Not necessarily good or bad, just different. I probably would have given this disc 5 / 5, but part of the reason for the post is showing off the &#8220;stars&#8221;, and I wanted to demonstrate an empty one too.
                </description    >
            </    simple-review    >
    </    xml-structured-blog-entry    >
    </    subnode>
    5:16 PM | View trackbacks (13) | Blog it

    Comments (1)

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    Picture of Anonymous
    ryan king wrote:
    The rating is *by default* on a scale of 1-5, but you can change that to be any scale you want by using the option "best" and "worst" fields.

    The multidimensional review example shows how: http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview#Multidimensional_Restaurant_Review

    (sorry, there's a lot of other stuff going on in that example,too).
    Oct. 2