[uf-discuss] uF Discovery? (was: FYI: Jeff Jarvis on microformats and Google Base)

[Ryan King]

On Nov 22, 2005, at 9:11 PM, Luke Arno wrote:

> On 11/22/05, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers at gmail.com> wrote:
>> By getting people to upload their data, Google Base bypasses one of
>> the harder problems of distributed data: finding the stuff. I'd be
>> interested in hearing of any ideas anyone has around here that might
>> be helpful for finding the stuff.
>>
>> Imagine there are lots and lots of microformat documents out there. I
>> want to get the data from a subset of these, e.g. restaurant reviews.
>> How do I do it?
>>
>> The strategies I've seen for data discovery to date have all left a
>> lot to be desired, e.g. in-the-wild links - require crawling; more
>> controlled link lists (e.g. on a Wiki or at a directory service) -
>> heavily centralised; UDDI etc - service oriented, hard work;
>> distributed RDF queries - potentially workable, but still a way off.
>> Others..? Or are there any obvious ways I've missed of reducing the
>> drawbacks of these techniques?
>>
>
> Distruted query stuff is still a ways off, I think.
>
> Any centralized-directory-stuff should be the result
> of the crawl, IMO.
>
> We just need more meaningful links, better trust
> and identity systems, and good syndication
> technology.
>
> Speaking of meaningful links...
>
> I am sure this has come up before, so sorry in
> advance, but could we use rel values to say
> "there are x and y uFs over there".

In most cases, this would be semantic abuse. Remember, rel and rev  
describe the *relationship* between the current page and the referred  
URL. Type could get you a big closer, but still wouldn't be very  
reliable.

> In other words, should there be a microformats
> discovery microformat? uF-links or some such?

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com