reviews-formats

Current Reviews Formats

There have been several efforts to define data formats for posting "reviews" of products, services etc. on the Web.

This page serves to document the current list of review schemas, formats, and efforts as background for the design of a simple reviews microformat. -Tantek

Notice that author appears several times in the list below, and that it sometimes refers to the author of the review, and other times to the author of the book being reviewed. A parenthetical will be used to distinguish them now.

Centralized Implementations

Insider Pages

Customer reviews of local businesses

• http://www.insiderpages.com

• • author (review author)
  • rating (0 - 5 stars)
  • business name
  • review title
  • review
  • pros
  • cons
  • business category
  • business address
  • business phone number
  • business e-mail address
  • business website

Amazon.com

• http://www.amazon.com/

• • author (book author)
  • publication date
  • title
  • description
  • rating (1 to 5 stars)
    • overall and by category
      • declared value and a maximum possible value
• vote for or against component

Mini-review

Mini reviews are limited to products on some areas of the site.

• rating (1 to 5 stars)
  • Their mini-review interface has an 'x,' but this does not mean a rating of '0,' but in their own verbiage 'Unrated.' So the interval is 1 to 5 starts, not 0 to 5 stars. --RyanKing 11:43, 18 Jan 2006 (PST)
• ownership status ([x] I own this)
• negative interest ([x] Not interested)

Blogcritics

• http://blogcritics.org/

• author (review author)
• title
• publication date
• description
• reviewed work identifier
• reviewed work title
• reviewed work version
  • release date
  • Volume, issue
  • edition
  • translation
• reviewed work author(s)
• reviewed work publisher

Consumer Reviews

• reviewed item
• reviewed item version
• rating
  • overall 1-100
  • by category 1-5
• definition list of specifications

Epinions

• http://epinions.com/

• author (review author)
• publication date
• title
• summary ("the bottom line")
• description
• rating overall and by category
• positive summary
• negative summary
• cost
• vote for or against product
• vote for or against review

Web site or page reviews

• http://en-us.sitereviews.org/
• http://www.stumbleupon.com/

Yahoo! Local

• http://local.yahoo.com/

• author (review author)
• publication date
• title
• description
• rating
  • overall and by category [1-5]
• positive summary
• negative summary

Restaurant

• usage datetime
• specific use

Nearlocal

• http://www.nearlocal.com/

Yelp

• http://www.yelp.com/

SF Survey

• http://sfsurvey.com/

Zagat

• rating by category
• cost
• description

delicious 3rd party

• http://alf.hubmed.org/rvw.htm

• rating (0-100%)
• tags (keywords, year, user-specified others)
• artist/author (work author)
• title
• URL
• comments
• unique identifier

iTunes XML

• rating (0-100%)

review world

• http://www.revieworld.com/

Dinner Buzz

• http://www.dinnerbuzz.com/

Previous Schemas and Formats

Generic to any kind of review

RVW

• http://www.pmbrowser.info/rvw/0.2/
  • http://hublog.hubmed.org/archives/000307.html <- this is a really old and out-of-date version
  • http://www.pmbrowser.info/wiki.pl?RVW
• variants for embedding in Atom, RSS2, RSS1, RDF
• apparent schema
  • author of review
  • content of review
  • creator of work
    • example: book author, movie director
  • percentage score rating
  • multiple identifiers
    • example: ISBN, ASIN, UPC, LOC
  • link to purchase
• appears to be loosely connected with the term "!OpenReviews" (has also referred to other efforts) which itself appears to be yet another OpenBlahBlah buzzword with no substance behind it (AKA placeholder term).

RDF Review Vocabulary

• RDF Review Vocabulary: http://www.purl.org/stuff/rev
  • Deployed in FilmTrust, see e.g. user profile
  • Extended version used for StructuredBlogging/RDF transformation (e.g. see sample review there's a reference to subnode-to-rdf-interpreter.xsl in the source).
  • Used in AllConsuming Reading Lists in RDF
  • Used in FOAF-a-matic Mark 2

Simple-Review XML

• Embeds XML in <script type="application/x-subnode">
• XSD
• apparent schema
  • review-title
  • item
    • name/title
    • type
    • URL
    • image URL
  • rating (user visible, max, normalized to 0..1 value)
  • comments/description

For specific domains

Movies

• How to Write a Movie Review

Books

• RDF schema for book reviews: http://www.amk.ca/xml/reviews.html

• see also book-info-examples

Thoughts on a Microformat

Thoughts towards a simple MicroFormat subset of earlier efforts, sufficient to express 80/20.

Common review fields

• item
  • optional:type of item (business, Web page/site, product, event, person, place, file, text)
  • name/title of item being reviewed (string | ["hCard"] if business or person)
    • optional:URL (all additional information should be somewhere else, not in the review itself)
    • optional:image (URL)
• reviewer (["hCard"]|name|email|URL)
• review publication/authoring date (ISO8601 datetime)
• rating 1 to 5 (default max = 5, default min = 1)
• optional:tags (keyword,rating)*
• optional:comments (string)

See hReview for the result and evolution of these thoughts on a microformat.