[uf-new] New proposal - aggregate microformats

[Kavi Goel]

[I've been hearing that this email may not have gone through, so I am
resending.]

Please read a proposal for microformats about aggregate data (i.e.
collections of reviews, collections of products, etc) below. Feedback
is encouraged.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kavi Goel <kavi at google.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 6:22 PM
Subject: New proposal - aggregate microformats
To: "For discussion of new microformats." <microformats-new at microformats.org>


Microformats gurus,

Awhile ago, I expressed interest in extending hReview to handle the
"aggregate reviews" case (i.e. 34 reviews, average rating of 3.5 / 5).
Currently hReview is designed to mark up only a single review, whereas
frequently on the web the aggregate info is more important than any
single user review. Technically, aggregating reviews by aggregating a
bunch of individual hReviews across a site can be very difficult, so
there is a lot of value to be gained by marking up aggregate
information directly.

The proposal that gained momentum was to define a new "aggregate
hReview" microformat that contains one field "count" and has one
embedded hReview. A further comment was made that if we are going to
define a new microformat, we should apply this idea more generally to
handle many types of aggregations rather than consider aggregate price
info (aggregate hProduct/hListing), aggregate discussion posts
(aggregate hAtom), etc separately.

Othar Hansson and I have put together a proposal to handle
aggregations of microformats in a general way. Please provide
feedback:
http://microformats.org/wiki/aggregate-microformat-template-examples
http://microformats.org/wiki/aggregate-microformat-template-brainstorming

Kavi