Microformats and Wikipedia

Microformats defined

Microformats are a way of adding simple markup to human-readable data items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.

http://microformats.org/wiki/introduction

• Seen by some as a way of "plugging the gaps" in HTML

Microformats in use on Wikipedia

• Adr (address information )• hAudio (information about audio recordings )• hCalendars (calendaring and events format )• hCards (people, companies, organizations, and

places )• Geo (geographic coordinates)• hMedia (publishing Images Video and Audio )• hProduct (product data )• hRecipe (self-explanatory)• Species ()

Operator add-on

• Operator (Mozilla) add-on looks for and provide functions for – hCard– hCalendar– Geo– Tag– xFolk– RDF

Geo example

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrcontains

• <span class="geo">52.548; -1.932</span>

Tagspaces example

• http://microformats.org/2010/04/28/google-adds-support-for-hcalendar-and-hrecipe-rich-snippets

• <a href="http://microformats.org/tag/rich-snippets" rel="tag">rich

snippets</a>

Twitter example

• http://twitter.com/

• <span class="thumb vcard author"><a href="http://twitter.com/Glenn_Emerson" class="tweet-url profile-pic url"><img alt="Glenn Emerson" class="photo fn" height="48" src="http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/702930262/pro_pic_normal.jpg" width="48" /></a></span>

References and links

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Microformats– WikiProject Microformats page

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4106/– Mozilla operator add-on page

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barr– Sample page with embedded Geo microformat

• http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page– Microformats wiki