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
- 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
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.
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