[uf-discuss] Plants Microformat

[Brian Suda]

I'm not a botanist, so i don't know all the intricacy of plants, but
as with all new microformats it is suggested that you get examples
from other sites and how they "describe" plants. These means that you
will need to collect what properties other sites use such as, TYPE,
WEATHER, WATER, AMOUNT OF SUNLIGHT, etc. Then you will need to also
get HOW they describe each attribute, for example AMOUNT OF SUNLIGHT,
is this it in hours, seasons, is it "shade" "no shade" "direct sun",
etc?

That should be your first task. If you can't find any data online,
then it begs the question of usefulness, but I don't want to
discourage you from looking. The nice thing about microformats is that
we can constantly iterate. We don't need to sit for years to make a
perfect system no one uses, we want to look at how the community at
large is working and try to make things easier for already published
data.

In the same vein as classification of plants, we might want to explore
making a simple microformat that mimics the classification system of
the taxonomy of organizims. Kingdom->Phylum->...Family->Species. That
way additional microformats (such as this plant idea) can use
something like <abbr title="homosapien" class="species">Human</abbr>
to uniquely identify data that can be cross-references in different
databases.

Any thoughts?
-brian

On 3/23/06, Scott Reynen <scott at randomchaos.com> wrote:
> On Mar 23, 2006, at 3:43 PM, Paul Bryson wrote:
>
> >> but it doesn't have the major problem of identification  with the
> >> latin
> >> terms acting as unique IDs.
> >
> > Is there any page that discusses the potential issues of using IDs in
> > microformats?
>
> Oh, I didn't mean ID attributes - just something to uniquely identify
> plants.  All plants have a unique latin name, so if two people
> discuss the same plant, it's easy to identify that they're both the
> same.  It's much more complicated with products, because different
> systems use different identifiers (bar codes, serial numbers, ISBN,
> VIN, etc.), which can overlap.  It's clear what <span class="latin-
> name">Erysimum Cheiri</span> means because there is only one
> "Erysimum Cheiri" in the plant world.  It's less clear what <span
> class="id">Q7639R087</span> means, because the meaning is very
> dependent on context.
>
> Peace,
> Scott
>
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--
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk