[uf-discuss] Re: work of art microformat

[Timothy Gambell]

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts, input, and contributions to  
the http://microformats.org/wiki/work-of-art project.

Given the recommendations on the wiki and this list, it seems to me  
that it would be best to design work of art as a distinct group of  
optional additions to use with the citation microformat. Does this  
seem like a good idea?

To address a few of the questions that have come up on the list:

Why not just add to or merge with citation? Though -- as Ryan Cannon  
and Bruce D'Arcus point out -- works of art on websites are  
conceptually similar to book citations on websites, the museum  
community and the library community have developed different  
conventions for presenting information about their holdings. Since  
there isn't a 1:1 mapping between these conventions, combining  
citation and work of art would probably result in more complexity  
(for citation) and less descriptive utility (for work of art).  
However, I'd be interested to hear if the folks involved with  
citation think it would be an acceptable trade-off.

Why not make work of art into a subsection of citation, as adr is to  
hCard? This might be a good idea, and it's one I'm open to, but it  
should be noted that while adr can express meaningful information on  
its own (that is, without the help of hCard), the proposed work of  
art extensions would rely on citation for core terms, and would not  
be able to express meaningful information without citation's help.  
Does that matter?

For the sake of discussion, I've compiled a comparison between the  
terms in the citation strawman on the wiki and some of the terms that  
have been proposed for work of art.

=== Rough list new of terms we'd propose for work of art (contributed  
by Samantha Orme, tweaked by Tim) ===

* creator (hCard)
* creator-dates
* creator-nationality
* creator-role
* creation-date (hCalendar)
	* earliest-date
	* latest-date
* type (the style/period/genre of the work -- merged with "subject"  
into citation's "keywords" field?)
* subject (the subject matter of the work -- merged with "type" into  
citation's "keywords" field?)
* measurements ("format"? "dimensions"?)
	* width
	* height
	* depth
	* duration
* medium
* source ("Current Location"? "Repository"? "Owner"? "Collection"? --  
combined with location using hCard)
* source-location (hCard or geo or adr)
* provenance (perhaps a list of hCalendar events, could allow for  
"Gift Of" if that information isn't included in copyright or notes)

=== Rough list of terms we'd use from citation (compiled from the  
Mike Strawman) ===

* title
* subtitle
* authors (as a special case of "creator")
* publication date (though we'd prefer "date", and even better  
"earliest-date" and "latest-date")
* link
* uid (though we'd prefer the term "identifier")
* pages (though this is only useful when the work of art is a book)
* series (CDWA's "Related Work")
* venue ("source" information could go here, depending on what's  
meant by venue)
* publisher (occasionally useful)
* container (CDWA's "Related Work")
* abstract
* notes (CDWA's "Descriptive Note" field)
* keywords (potentially a combination of "subject" and "type")
* image
* copyright
* language

Again, thanks to everyone who has been involved with the work of art  
project.

All best,
Tim.