[uf-discuss] Plants Microformat

[Breton Blake Slivka]

Brian, if you look at the wiki, it would seem that he already has done 
much of what you list.
I'm with you so far as defining the simpler microformat first for the 
Latin classification system.
My thought is that it's a very specific microformat, which sort of bucks 
the trend of very broadly applicable microformats thus far defined and 
set as "official" specifications on microformats.org.

My suggestion is, a plant microformat does not necessarily require the 
endorsement of microformats.org. If one desires to propose a new format 
for something, it is much easier to build support if there are already 
tools available which can make use of it. That is, make the plant 
information aggregator *first*, /then/ market the format. This is part 
of the reason why I believe hCalendar and hCard have gained such wide 
adoption, as there is already x2v, the relevant creator applets, and the 
wide range of existing applications which could already make use of 
vcard and icalendar files produced from x2v.

However, a species classification microformat would fit right in with 
the other broadly applicable microformats on microformats.org.




Brian Suda wrote:
> I'm not a botanist, so i don't know all the intricacy of plants, but
> as with all new microformats it is suggested that you get examples
> from other sites and how they "describe" plants. These means that you
> will need to collect what properties other sites use such as, TYPE,
> WEATHER, WATER, AMOUNT OF SUNLIGHT, etc. Then you will need to also
> get HOW they describe each attribute, for example AMOUNT OF SUNLIGHT,
> is this it in hours, seasons, is it "shade" "no shade" "direct sun",
> etc?
>
> That should be your first task. If you can't find any data online,
> then it begs the question of usefulness, but I don't want to
> discourage you from looking. The nice thing about microformats is that
> we can constantly iterate. We don't need to sit for years to make a
> perfect system no one uses, we want to look at how the community at
> large is working and try to make things easier for already published
> data.
>
> In the same vein as classification of plants, we might want to explore
> making a simple microformat that mimics the classification system of
> the taxonomy of organizims. Kingdom->Phylum->...Family->Species. That
> way additional microformats (such as this plant idea) can use
> something like <abbr title="homosapien" class="species">Human</abbr>
> to uniquely identify data that can be cross-references in different
> databases.
>
> Any thoughts?
> -brian
>
>