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Microformats

Page history last edited by Owen Stephens 12 years, 6 months ago

Use of existing microformats

Existing microformats suitable for use by museums:

  • hAudio for audio files
  • hCard for venues, people and organisations (only does Gregorian birth dates in the range 1583-9999 CE)
  • hCalendar for events (forthcoming and historic; but only does Gregorian dates in the range 1583-9999 CE)
  • 'Species' for vernacular and scientific names of living things
  • hListing & hProduct for museum shops

Prior discussion

Proposed microformats and other inconclusive discussion:

Microformat for Objects

If there is to be a microformat for (museum) objects, what would we want from it?

  • Interoperabiity with LIDO, Dublin Core, etc
  • A singular version of hProduct microformat (e.g. use hProduct for selling an iPad; the new uF for a speciific iPad in a museum
  • Consideration of the issue of vague ("c. 1503–1506") and non-Gregorian dates (see Extended Date Time Format efforts based at the USA’s Library of Congress)
  • ...

A starter for 10...

An object microformat is only likely to be useful to museums and their audiences if it includes, as a minimum, there properties

  • Object name (use "fn" from hProduct - REQUIRED)
  • Category (painting, sculpture, garment etc; pre-Raphaelite, Egyptian, etc; storage, display, restoration etc; may be plural; could use rel-tag; from hProduct)
  • Description (text; from hProduct)
  • Photo (URL of; could be plural; from hProduct)
  • URL (must be singular; from hProduct)
  • Identifier (type & value; from hProduct)
  • Creation date
  • Maker (aka artist; may be plural; use hCard)
  • Place of origin (use hCard)
  • (current) Location (use hCard)
  • Owner (use hCard)
  • Custodian (use hCard)

Comments (4)

Mia said

at 8:32 pm on Apr 16, 2010

Thanks Andy - really useful stuff.

Mia said

at 12:26 pm on Jul 10, 2010

Thinking back to various discussions, two related questions that museums might have: what might use cases for microformats be, and what's the business case for microformats?

And one concern: do microformats like hCalendar still use the abbreviation tag? Accessibility is pretty important for museums.

Andy Mabbett said

at 12:51 pm on Jul 10, 2010

Use/ business cases include better searchability (consider how Google are using microformats to provide in "rich snippets" in their results.

Adding microformats to page content makes that content readable (and this searchable, indexable, and aggregatable), by machines, as metadata. It's also possible to extract any microformatted data as RDF, so all the benefits of RDF apply.

The ABBR issue has been resolved by the "value class pattern": http://microformats.org/wiki/value-class-pattern

Mia said

at 1:49 pm on Jul 10, 2010

Thanks!

In a way the biggest barrier is lack of thinking time for museum technologists trying to get their heads around this, and the lack of worked examples for people who just want a recipe to follow. I've listed some sample objects in the comments at http://museum-api.pbworks.com/Linking+Museums+write-up and will have a go at worked examples later, trying out some of the suggestions on this wiki and from the meetup.

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