[uf-new] re: Microformats support for aggregate reviews

[Kavi Goel]

Sarven and Toby, thanks for your responses.

Sarven -- the challenge with doing aggregation at the parser level is
that not all reviews are contained on a single page. For example, this
iPod page on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001FA1NFA/) has
443 reviews. Only 10 are contained on each page. Even if the parser
knew which pages to go to, it would still have to crawl 45 pages to
come up with the aggregate rating. Much easier is to simply read the
aggregate information that is already summarized on the first page.

Toby -- I think your approach makes sense, but I have two questions.
1) how does the parser know how many user reviews contributed to the
aggregate score? I think we would need some sort of explicit markup of
this information rather than extracting it from a natural language
review description.
2) can you clarify how a site would use the rel-tag to mark a review
as an aggregate, for example, how Amazon or Yelp might do it on their
page? I expect that very few sites will be willing to change their
pages' UI to include metadata about reviews. Rel-tags, as far as I
know, are visible links. Apologies in advance if I am
misunderstanding.

Kavi

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 3:17 AM, Toby A Inkster <mail at tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Kavi Goel wrote:
>
>> I'm interested in finding a way for microformats to support marking up
>> aggregate reviews. Currently, hReview is focused on individual
>> reviews, but there are many sites that aggregate reviews. I would love
>> to hear your feedback.
>
> I don't understand what is needed that is not already present in hReview.
>
> If you wish to publish a list of reviews plus an average rating at the top, then use hReview for each individual review, and an hReview at the top containing the average rating. For the average rating, set the hReview "reviewer" property to an hCard for the aggregation organisation. To avoid repeating the item info in each review, just put it in the aggregate review and use the include pattern in the individual reviews. The aggregate review can be explicitly marked as an aggregate by rel-tagging it so. The aggregate review "description" property could be along the lines of "This rating is an average of 38 people's reviews".
>
> --
> Toby A Inkster
> <mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
>
>
>
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