On 5 Jan 2008, at 16:07, Andy Mabbett wrote:
Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I want to do, in terms of
marking up content, is determined by how people are going to use
the web site.
Yes, but you don't know how people are going to use it.
Yes I do. If I'm building an archive of documents related to maritime
history, I've got a pretty good idea of how historians and amateur
geneologists are going to use it. I don't know what sort of
applications people might develop on top of our data, and I think
that's where opening up museum collections gets really interesting.
If people want more intelligent searches - 'show me manuscripts
written by Captain Cook' - then rel-tag seems like the natural
tool for marking up names.
Suppose I want to know what Captain Cook drank; and that your
manuscript includes a letter from Cook to a friend back home,
saying "I don't miss much of home, but I could murder a pint of Mrs
Hecklethump's famous beer"
...and the text referencing Cook within the letter, or article, is
"James Cook" or "the captain of the Endeavour" or simply "James" but
not "Captain Cook".
So I need to be able to specify that I only want pages which refer
to a person called "Captain Cook" - in other words, who has an
hCard whose "honorary-prefix" is "Captain" and whose "given-name"
is "Cook". [One day, I might also be able to search for "hBeverage"
or some such (perhaps a subset of "hRecipe") instead of "beer", too.]
Or, better, you want a search which finds all text tagged as
referring to a person whose canonical name is "Captain James Cook."
That way, you don't have to worry that your search term needs to
exactly match the text, only the tag. In fact, a clever enough search
could probably find all tags which are names of people and are close
matches to your search term, then find all the documents tagged with
those tags. Something like this search I put together for our prints
collection:
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/prints/browseHeadings.cfm?
filter=subjects&node=663
Tagging can handle this if there's a mechanism in place to put some
context on the tag - indicate that it refers to a person, a place, a
business or whatever.
That's how using hCard adds re-usable semantics to a person's name,
even if that's the only "vcard" data you publish about them.
Yes, but aren't you assuming that Cook's name, including rank, will
be present in the text, which won't be the case. Cook didn't sign his
letters "Captain Cook". He may well have signed personal letters
simply as "James".
I don't see a use case for getting the contact details of Captain
Cook.
hCard does a specific job very, very well - it enhances social
networking. I'm struggling to see, though, how it generalises to
marking up the names of all people, living and dead.
As explained previously, hCard is not /just/ for contact details;
it's "for representing people, companies, organizations, and
places". That's quoted directly from its spec. And that's how it's
already being used, "in the wild".
Are there any examples where it's being used for something other than
social networking?
For instance, adding a tag doesn't tell a future search engine
that your text is about a person.
I think the answer to this is the rel-tag microformat coupled with
sensible URLs to give much more intelligent tags. Imagine if the
Maritime Museum archives used tags like:
<a rel="tag" href="/search/person/Emma_Hamilton">William
Hamilton's wife</a>
<a rel="tag" href="/search/vessel/HMS_Victory">the Victory</a>
<a rel="tag" href="/search/person/Captain_James_Cook">Captain
Cook</a>
There's enough info in the HTML there to allow for some quite
intelligent searching.
Only if you can get everyone to use the same URL structure, and to
make all the subjects in their content into links.
Yes, that's why I'm interested in a lightweight, flexible solution
that could be applied to archives in general, not just the holdings
of the National Maritime Museum.
Classes distinguishing between the different types of tag could
be added to the links too.
Indeed - and the appropriate class, in the latter case, would be
"vcard", with "fn, "honorary-prefix" and "given name" around the
content as per the hCard spec. Why would you want to invent a new
set of classes?
I don't, if hcard will do the job. But I also have to be able to mark
up the phrase 'William Hamilton's wife' with the name 'Emma
Hamilton', using the same set of classes, to indicate that she's also
a person. hcard applies to one very specific subset of reference
strings, those which are the exact names of people, but not to
reference strings in general. A solution that doesn't apply to all
references to people may not be very useful to this particular problem.
Jim
Jim O'Donnell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens
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