[uf-dev] Re: Microformat FAQs for RDF fans (from [uf-discuss])

[Danny Ayers]

On 11/8/05, David Janes -- BlogMatrix <davidjanes at blogmatrix.com> wrote:
> Hi Danny,
>
> Very interesting. Re: [1], do you know if anyone's done any practical
> work with GRDDL to extract data from some of the more complex
> microformats, such has hCard, hCalendar or hReview.

Hmm, by rights GRDDL needs the profile URIs, few of which have been
specified. But there is some microformat2rdfxml XSLT around - I
started one for hReview [1] (Alf Eaton was looking at fixing the bugs
;-) , there's the basis of a hCalendar trnslator at [2], Dan
Connolly's been noodling with hCard for a while e.g. [3], not sure if
he's done the XSLT yet.

I've made a start at trying to get a list of what there is together on
[4]. I'm very near the point where I want the GRDDL/XSLT with the code
I've been working on, so pretty soon I might have to fill in some of
the blanks myself.

> It seems that there's more than a little overlap with the ongoing
> discussion about parsing microformats in a general sort of way.

Yep. Half the generic parser problem is that you need to have some
idea of the target representation - relational tables, object model or
whatever. RDF is a good target because of its support for
defined-on-the-fly structures (that's probably why I'm more upbeat
about a generic microformat parser). More immediately, the GRDDL
approach does simplify matters somewhat - as long as someone has done
the XSLT from a given format into RDF/XML, a quasi-generic parser is
available.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://pragmatron.org/docs/misc/hreview.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfcal/#L1879
[3] http://www.advogato.org/person/connolly/diary.html?start=26
[4] http://micromodels.org

--

http://dannyayers.com