Since nobody else seems to be dropping a line in the discussion board
about this, I may as well.
This entry was placed in the wikipedia a short while ago by Tim Gambell
http://microformats.org/wiki/work-of-art
Personally, I think it's an interesting idea, possibly because I
would find it terribly useful myself. Though I can think of a few
problems such a format could solve, it's a curious absence from Tim
Gambell's entries, which could present some ambiguities when it comes
to the choices to be made in terms of the properties which get
chosen. In addition, many art sites get really iffy about copyrights,
so I would be very careful not to tread on anyone's toes.
Just to open discussion, here are the problems it might solve for me:
Problem #1. I'm a college student who takes art history courses. At
many times I have been presented with the problem of creating flash
cards for the exams in these courses. How much time I could have
saved with a work-of-art aggregator, and an xslt sheet which could
produce printable flashcards automatically from the wide range of art
sites out in the wild.
Problem #2. I mentioned previously that I would be shortly
redesigning an art gallery's website making heavy use of
microformats. I was just informed that they want to reproduce
photographs of all the art and sculpture from each artist for the
purposes of working with clientelle in making an informed decision
about the purchase of art work. With a microformat as a guide to
"best practices" such a catalogue could easily be collected into a
searchable database.
Potential pitfalls:
How would this microformat fit into a Gallery Schema? with next and
previous links, and thumbnails etc, which you see often in artist's
portfolios, and sites like flickr.
Would this include photographs as a work-of-art? would it be worth
distinguishing between a photograph of a peice of art, and a
photograph which IS the art?
There seems to be a large amount of overlap with hReview. While
hReview isn't a perfect fit, one would want to re-use as much of the
work done on hReview as possible.
As I work on this Gallery site, I may find myself contributing to
'work-of-art"
that is all.
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