[uf-discuss] xfn and biographies

[Jim O'Donnell]

Hello,

At work, I'm kicking around microformats as a method for adding  
additional semantic information to archives - letters, diary entries,  
log books and so on. I blogged a little about this already - using  
rel-tag to tie together related materials:
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/archives/2008/01/microformats_an_1.html

Does anyone have any thoughts on using xfn (or some variant thereof)  
to add machine-readable relationships to published biographies? Or in  
general, to express the relationships that exist within the network  
of people associated with an archive of published writing? A specific  
example is the link from
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/flinders/ListPeople.cfm?ID=41
to http://www.nmm.ac.uk/flinders/ListPeople.cfm?ID=96 (near the end  
of the biography) where I could potentially mark that Ann is the  
daughter of Matthew. If xfn is embedded inside a hcard, does it refer  
to the person referenced by the hcard as the source of the  
relationship? Would I also need to somehow markup "Flinders, Matthew"  
with a URL so it's explicit, to a parser, which Matthew Flinders  
we're talking about?

Also, the rel attribute on links seems handy for expressing  
relationships between letters and their authors, or letters and their  
recipients, or even letters in a series of correspondence. Does  
anyone know if there are any examples of this out there already?

I'll try to mock up some prototype pages next month, but thought I'd  
get comments from people with practical experience of using  
microformats before I start.

Thanks
Jim

Jim O'Donnell
jim at eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens