super-slow to spot this...

Jeremy — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:29:37 +0000

Somehow despite the fact that this was posted right at the start of the forums, when I was most watching avidly them, I missed this thread. I guess I just didn't know what it meant!

Recently I did some work on a microformat for museum objects (in the context of the semantic web, and how to embed a light level of meaning into the UI) and I belatedly came across what Tim and others had done. Unfortunately Work-of-Art seems to have frozen in Spring last year, but nevertheless I think it's worth reviving. At the very least I would be interested to know if the project is likely to go further, since it would be the opposite of clever to initiate a fork between microformats by continuing to work on my own one. Certainly WoA is much more developed than my efforts.

My own approach has been a little different, and ideally I would like to see work-of-art become a little broader in scope so that it could be used to embody data on the gamut of museum objects from art works to natural history specimens or buildings. I have left the MF itself very light for now but included (a) a GUID and (b) a pointer to a URI where an application can find data on the object. This aspect is not really very microformat-like, but struck me as a way to start to build bridges between the user-friendliness of microformats and the machine-orientation of the semantic web, and the idea is that the URI could point just at a fuller microformat record, or at DC or CDWALite metadata, for example (following WoA's lead of using these standards as the basis for further work).

What I have done as a proof of concept is develop a (fragile and limited) application that lets users gather together and tag/describe objects from (in principle) any website, in a sort of cross between del.icio.us and Tails or Zotero, with a bit of steve flung in. If steve is still planning on using WoA I'd love to hear about it. And are you still out there, Tim?

Jeremy Ottevanger

art description microformat -- fantastic!

jtrant — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 14:18:11 +0000

Tim,

this is great work. one of the challenges with museum content is how to integrate it with other information in a consistent way, so that it can be used and re-used by the people who study and use our collections -- or just appreciate them.

a modular description, that can be plugged in to other contexts is a great step towards enabling use (and enabling our own re-use of collections information in multiple institutional contexts.) Microformats are just that -- the building blocks of web 2.0 applications.

We're going to be looking at this format's applicability within steve.

thanks for getting this ball rolling!

j. trant
archives & museum informatics
www.archimuse.com

museumsandtheweb.com - Comments for "Work of Art Microformat"

super-slow to spot this...

art description microformat -- fantastic!