[uf-discuss] Re: one citation microformat use case (Michael McCracken)

[Tantek Ç elik]

In short, most of these questions/suppositions are answered/discussed the
following wiki pages.

 http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats

 http://microformats.org/wiki/distributed-conversation

 http://microformats.org/wiki/citation


On 2/14/06 6:43 AM, "David Osolkowski" <qidydl at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2/14/06, Michael McCracken <michael.mccracken at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Speaking from my own viewpoint and that of the BibDesk users I've talked to
>> (generally academics, not librarians - it is a bibtex editor), I think that
>> a complete resource description framework would be welcome, but probably
>> overkill.
> 
> The pun Ryan made: http://www.w3.org/RDF/.  That would be the
> uppercase-Semantic Web side of the fence, which microformats aren't
> exactly aligned with.

Rather, it is the uppercase-Semantic Web which is not particularly aligned
with existing Web publishing practices.  Microformats explicitly uses
existing publishing practices as the bases for design.

> Someone more involved with the politics can
> probably explain it better.

Similar goals (the publication of more semantic information), with very
different approaches (making *the* Web more semantic (microformats), vs.
making a new/parallel Semantic Web).  See here for more:

 http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats

All differences aside, using XMDP+GRDDL, microformatted information can be
*read* as triples directly into an RDF store, and thus it may be that
microformats provide the richest source of semantic (both upper and
lowercase) information on the Web.


> The simple just-a-link references are, I would imagine, already
> covered by the cite tag and attributes;

Not quite.  See above distributed-conversation reference.


> if we need a microformat, it
> would be for more complex data like a full MLA citation.  It might be
> worthwhile to simply take the common MLA formats and translate them
> into microformats and see what that gets us.  We may also be able to
> reuse terms from Dublin Core.

Please see http://microformats.org/wiki/citation and related pages, a lot of
work has already done and it would be great if you could add your thoughts
there.


> I'm kind of fuzzy on the use cases,

See http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples in particular.


> so if I'm off-base, let me know.
> I know there are also citation formats other than MLA, I'm not
> familiar with any of them though.

See http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats .

Thanks,

Tantek