Hey StatusNet devs, In the few months I've spent so far building a semantic, e-commerce product comparison and review service built on top of StatusNet, I've felt a real need to be able to add custom metadata to notices.
Semantic metadata help machines and other services better figure out, when reading notices, if a user is satisfied with a product (think hReview), if a merchant is selling it right now and at what price (hListing), etc. Lots of other use cases come to mind. For example, StatusNet Music (great GSoC project, by the way!) adds listening metadata to notices (but does so from a custom action). In short, the notice text is the human readable version of data that are being passed between services on a decentralized Web. Well, those of you who have heard about Twitter Annotations know this is exactly what they are about: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/annotations_overview Annotations are not in production at Twitter yet, so this is our chance to prove once again that the StatusNet community is more agile ;) I've started an Annotations plugin that I hope can be useful to some of you: Right now you can submit a notice with Annotations either from the API or from the web interface's notice form (example included). The only catch compared to Twitter's specs here is that you can only submit them in JSON format, not Twitter's custom format (but that wouldn't be too hard to add). Annotations are stored directly in JSON and they are shown alongside the rest of the notice from any API call that shows one. However, to be really useful, they also need to be transformed in some way that makes searching or aggregating on a specific annotation type, attribute or value, easy. So, for selected annotations types and attributes (that you can specify), we probably want to store them in their own database table. Anyways: code is here : http://gitorious.org/statusnet/mainline/merge_requests/148 More implementations details can be found and discussed at http://status.net/wiki/Plugin:Annotations Feel free to poke around and let me know what you think. Cheers, Julien _______________________________________________ StatusNet-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev
