[uf-discuss] Product Data Microformat

[Tantek Ç elik]

Hi Chris,

On 2/27/06 1:59 AM, "Chris Roos" <chris at seagul.co.uk> wrote:

> David Beach wrote:
>> I'm David Beach. I work for Yahoo! in Yahoo! Shopping. I'm interested in
>> creating a microformat for product information. It's possible that this
>> could be very useful for merchants, manufacturers, and aggregators. I
>> think that this would complement hReview and hListing.
>> 
>> Does anyone know if there has been any progress in this area? I've done
>> some research and haven't found anything specific. I'd be interested in
>> collaborating with folks to create such a standard.
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>> 
> I think this is something we would be interested in getting involved in
> too.  Would people see this encompassing the concept of a "universal
> object identifier"?  I can see that this might not be core to a product
> microformat but would definitely be good to get some discussion going.

Right.  In practice when people discuss products on web pages (e.g. blogs)
today, they use URLs.  I've seen pretty much zero use of something like a
GUID or opaque "universal object identifier" *except* coincidentally within
some URL (e.g. ASINs inside of amazon.com URLs).

IMHO the concept of a "universal object identifier" is orthogonal to a
product microformat.  A product microformat does not need it, but could use
it as just another URI if is present.


> I work for reevoo.com where we aggregate reviews from blogs and our
> corporate site.  

Great!  Keep up the good work!


> We need to be able to determine what product a review
> is about (hence the interest in the universal object id) in order to
> group it with other reviews of the same product.

As a start, you could certainly group by URLs used.

Something to keep in mind, the key here is to make it easy for people talk
about products on the web, and only secondarily to make it easy for
parsers/aggregators to do so.


> It'd be good to hear how other people are attacking this problem and how
> it fits in with the proposed product microformat.

So far there is no proposed product microformat, only folks calling for
participation in research to start developing one.  I very much encourage
you to jump right in and help out with the
http://microformats.org/wiki/process for developing a product microformat.

Thanks,

Tantek