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

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- this is a really old and out-of-date version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

Google Safe Search Meta

In https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/safesearch Google recommends marking "adult" (presumably "NSFW" or "X-Rated") pages with:

<meta name="rating" content="adult">

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

review-formats