item-formats

Formats

This section documents existing formats related to describing items/things.

Existing Microformats

Two microformats (hListing, hReview) already explicitly deal with "things" and in fact do provide a node for gather attributes to the thing. In the case when they're refering to people, they both use class="item vcard" but when they're refering to things they just use class="item".

hListing

• hListing explicitly marks the presense of an item using the "item" tag
• inside we find:
  • fn -- the name of the item
  • url -- the url of the item
  • photo -- the url of a photo of the item
  • email -- the email address of the item (?)
  • geo -- the coordinates of an item in the world
  • adr -- the address of the item

hReview

• hreview explicitly marks the presence of an item using the "item" tag
• inside we find:
  • fn -- the name of the item
  • url -- the url of the item
  • photo -- the url of a photo of the item
  • email -- the email address of the item (?)
  • geo -- the coordinates of an item in the world
  • adr -- the address of the item
• also of interest:
  • description -- the opinion of the reviewer; if we were to reuse class="description" then we would be breaking parsers

hCard

hCard is used to mark up people and organizations. However, we find that many of the fields are reused in both hReview and hListing. Here are other fields that potentially could be reused (see RFC 2426 for defintions). Some of these may be stretching too far:

• BDAY - to represent age of an item
• NICKNAME - a nickname for an otem
• ORG - "organizational name and units ssociated with the vCard"
• UID - globally unique ID.

Google Base

About Google Base:

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we'll make searchable on Google (if your content isn't online yet, we'll put it there). You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches. In fact, based on your items' relevance, users may find them in their results for searches on Froogle, Google Maps and even our main Google web search.

Item Types

Here are the predefined Google Base item types. Note:

• this may be broader than what we wish to cover in a potential item microformat, especially since many of these are covered by existing microformats.
• the "real" list is open ended -- you can define your own types

Item Types:

• Course schedules
• Events
• Jobs
• Housing*
• News and articles
• People profiles
• Products*
• Recipes
• Research studies and publications
• Reviews
• Services
• Travel
• Vehicles*
• Want_ads*

There's a "*" next to Item Types that describe physical things; the links lead to a description of the examples page.

Attribute Types

Google Base Items are defined by compositing Attribute Types together. A complete list of Google Base Attribute types is available here. These are, for example: actor, age, agent, apparel_type, .... Many of these items (actor, agent, for example) are actuall in microformats terms complete microformats in and off themselves.

Data Types

All Google Base attributes are defined in terms of a few simple, elementry types: string, int, float, intUnit, floatUnit, date, dateTime, dateTimeRange, url, boolean, location

Dublin Core

• metadata terms: http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/

X.520/X.521

Apparently a lot of vCard terminology is built on these standards, but little useful information can be found on the web.

See Also

• examples
• formats
• brainstorming
• initial discussion