[uf-discuss] Product Data Microformat

[Chris Roos]

Mike Dierken wrote:
>> 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.

> I think you mean 'universal product identifier' like a UPC or EAN for
> /everything/. This is a tough problem. There are many products without
> built-in identifiers (UPC, manufacturer+partnumber, etc), many people
> don't know that data even if it did exist and people make mistakes.
> The closest thing to a 'universal product identifier' is the Amazon
> ASIN and I know a bit about how that works - it's great but obviously
> not perfect. There are other systems that do something similar for
> some areas - like the OCLC database.

Hi Mike,

I do indeed mean a 'universal product identifier' (my chosen terminology 
came straight from the hreview wiki page).  At the most basic level, we 
need to know whether two products are the same.  To that end, we 
currently 'understand' the custom urn's at this location[1].  The part 
that is currently incomplete is the resolution of all urn's for a given 
product to that one product (a process that's improving over time).

As Tantek mentioned, this concept is basically unrelated to a product 
microformat itself.  However, I'm interested in what use cases people 
have for a product microformat that don't involve knowledge of whether 
two products are the same / product identification?

Cheers,

Chris

[1] http://www.reevoo.com/default/schema