review-formats

Current Review 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

Contributors

Copied from reviews-formats which itself was contributed from Technorati Developer's Wiki: ReviewsFormats)

• Tantek Çelik
• Niall Kennedy

See Also

• review-examples
• review-brainstorming
• hReview

Notes

Notice that author appears several times in the lists 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.

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- this is a really old and out-of-date version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

Google Base Formats

Google Base provided examples of uploading reviews in several formats. They provided sample files to be used as a template for creating your own files to upload to Google Base. They provided samples in the following formats: txt, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0. In all cases, they share the same basic vocabulary:

• vocabulary:
  • author
  • description
  • expiration_date
  • id
  • image_link
  • link
  • location
  • name_of_item_reviewed
  • publish_date
  • rating
  • review_type
  • reviewer_type
  • title
  • url_of_item_reviewed

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

See Also

• review-examples
• review-brainstorming
• hReview

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