[uf-discuss] Plants Microformat

[C. Hudley]

On 3/23/06, Brian Suda <brian.suda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

I would second the potential usefulness of this.  I run a site that
deals with all kinds of species names - mammals, insects,
single-cells, plants.  These are taken and derefenced from large
taxonomies such as ITIS and the NCBI Taxonomy, which we use to keep
our own application internally consistent.

It would be very helpful to have a common way to specify just a few
taxonomic fields - common name, latin name, etc.  We could then crawl
and aggregate from diverse sites with potentially consistent results
in third-party apps.  If that might shrink the scope of the work on
plants, even better.

(Noting, also, the taxonomic meaning of "class"...)

As for demarcating identifiers, the unAPI specification defines its
own span w/class='unapi-uri', the full identifier in the title
attribute value, and a human-readable form in the span text content,
mimicking the abbr pattern previously suggested and used here.


--
C. Hudley
We Know The Truth, Inc.