context and quality (was Re: [uf-discuss] Re: using namespace)

[Jesse Rodgers]

Hi,

This conversation is interesting as it is related to my research for
my msc. Has there been any discussion on the value of adding higher
level context to microformats? In the case of hCal, say you have event
listings for some organization. If you were to parse out the content
of the site you would grab the events, yay. But you don't really know
what those events are for beyond the URL of the site or maybe the site
title. But is that consistent, do all sites title reflect the context
of the page and how it relates to affiliated sites? If you had more
formats on a page and you were looking at dozens of similar sources
(say higher education sites), wouldn't a machine benefit from some
extra information?

Say on a uni home page I have some formats, I would like to know that
it is a university and it is the central home page. If I go down to a
faculty or school within that site I would want to know the
relationship that information has. In a lot of cases faculties,
schools, and departments are not in the main domain. Having a format
at the top level that let a script know where the information is
coming from and how it relates could be helpful. You could have
class="schoolname faculty /organizationunit department" at a higher
level. So on a Faculty of Science page at Waterloo you would have
"UniversityofWaterloo Science Physics"

Yes you could handle that in the meta tags and maybe that is the
obvious answer... I haven't really thought this through but when you
are dealing with massive and bizarre web spaces of higher education I
can certainly see how some context would help assess the quality of
the information. When you talk about namespaces it makes me think
about that one part of the Semantic Web conversation of trusting the
data and you need some context to help with the trust.

The problem I am trying to solve is how to get some consistency and
context in the HTML within sections of a larger web space that doesn't
entirely live in the same domain.

Jesse