[uf-discuss] work of art microformat

[Breton Slivka]

Since nobody else seems to be dropping a line in the discussion board  
about this, I may as well.

This entry was placed in the wikipedia a short while ago by Tim Gambell
http://microformats.org/wiki/work-of-art

Personally, I think it's an interesting idea, possibly because I  
would find it terribly useful myself. Though I can think of a few  
problems such a format could solve, it's a curious absence from Tim  
Gambell's entries, which could present some ambiguities when it comes  
to the choices to be made in terms of the properties which get  
chosen. In addition, many art sites get really iffy about copyrights,  
so I would be very careful not to tread on anyone's toes.

Just to open discussion, here are the problems it might solve for me:

Problem #1. I'm a college student who takes art history courses. At  
many times I have been presented with the problem of creating flash  
cards for the exams in these courses. How much time I could have  
saved with a work-of-art aggregator, and an xslt sheet which could  
produce printable flashcards automatically from the wide range of art  
sites out in the wild.

Problem #2. I mentioned previously that I would be shortly  
redesigning an art gallery's website making heavy use of  
microformats.  I was just informed that they want to reproduce  
photographs of all the art and sculpture from each artist for the  
purposes of working with clientelle in making an informed decision  
about the purchase of art work.  With a microformat as a guide to  
"best practices" such a catalogue could easily be collected into a  
searchable database.


Potential pitfalls:
How would this microformat fit into a Gallery Schema? with next and  
previous links, and thumbnails etc, which you see often in artist's  
portfolios, and sites like flickr.

Would this include photographs as a work-of-art? would it be worth  
distinguishing between a photograph of a peice of art, and a  
photograph which IS the art?

There seems to be a large amount of overlap with hReview. While  
hReview isn't a perfect fit, one would want to re-use as much of the  
work done on hReview as possible.

As I work on this Gallery site, I may find myself contributing to  
'work-of-art"

that is all.