[uf-new] Proposed Microformats: hRebuttal, hEvidence, hSource, hConclusion and hArgument

[Danny Ayers]

On 24/05/07, Colin Barrett <timber at lava.net> wrote:

 Microformats are about paving the
> cowpaths, and solving real problems.

Do they have to be HTML cowpaths? There's a very deep cowpath here,
dating back at least to the Socratic Method. Solving real problems is
definitely in scope - much of the recent work on dialogue mapping is
concerned with solving "Wicked Problems" [1].

> it seems people are perfectly content to use the semantic information
> built into English to denote parts of an argument, rather than marking
> things up with HTML.

Ok, maybe this is largely the case on the web (though it has been
done, see [2]), though elsewhere a lot of work has been done on
getting the machines to help (e.g. see [3]). I'd suggest the relative
paucity of this kind of material on the web is at least in part due to
the lack of available tools (such as microformats) for expressing the
information in a useful machine-processable fashion.

To me it doesn't seem a great stretch from simple threaded discussions
(like the reply-to of this very thread) to typed content (Argument,
Question...) and semantic relations (agree, disagree...). There's an
example of this done as simple semantic HTML at [4] (background - at
[5]) - View Source.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problems
[2] http://www.eekim.com/software/perlIBIS/
[3] http://www.cognexus.org/id27.htm
[4] http://web.archive.org/web/20040118015602/bitsko.slc.ut.us/2003/12/ssff.html
[5] http://web.archive.org/web/20040107175112/www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg01642.html

-- 

http://dannyayers.com