aggregate-microformat-template-examples

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Aggregate microformats: examples

The Problem

Many pages on the web contain or reference aggregates or summaries of other data: a summary of 173 reviews for a business, a summary of 25 running shoes for sale, a summary of a discussion with 501 individual posts. Often the summary data is as important or more important than the individual pieces of data being summarized, so we would like to have a way to mark them up using microformats.

We tried to solve this for the case of review summaries (i.e. 35 reviews, average rating is 4.5 stars), but then realized that our approach applied to similar problems of aggregating other kinds of microformat data. The problem is to come up with a simple "pattern" or "template" that can be used to annotate aggregate information about pages that contain or reference multiple microformat instances.


Participants

  • Othar Hansson
  • Kavi Goel


Real-World Examples

Aggregate reviews (aggregate hReview)

Showing aggregate review information for products or businesses is very common on the web. hReview is designed to annotate a single user's review but not summarize a collection of user reviews.

  • Amazon
    • http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001FA1NFA/
    • Aggregation of user reviews for a product. Up to 10 reviews per page
    • Includes 1-5 stars average rating and the total number of reviews
    • Also includes number of reviews for each score (1-5)
  • Yelp
    • http://www.yelp.com/biz/vive-sol-restaurant-mountain-view
    • Shows 1-5 stars average rating and the total number of reviews
    • Also includes number of reviews for each score (1-5)
    • The site highlights recurring themes from reviews (i.e. "The food is delicious - love the chicken mole.") and the number of reviews where such comments were made.

For a longer list of aggregate review examples, see aggregate-review-examples.

Summary of discussion boards (aggregate hAtom)

Lists of product offers (aggregate hListing?)

Another common occurrence on the web is to have many offers for a product from different sellers. Shopping aggregators like Amazon, Nextag, Pricegrabber, etc all do this. Solving this problem also requires some rationalization of hListing and hProduct, but in any case aggregations of offers examples are as follows.

Summaries that only contain a count

For many search results pages (or category pages showing a list of items), just knowing the number of results is valuable.

See also