jeremy's picture

super-slow to spot this...

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

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