Lots of us like to write tasting notes. In fact, there are millions of tasting notes out on the web. Many just have a score and maybe a few impressions of the wine. Others, though, include detailed information about the wine, background on the winery, and what food was paired with it. Some tasting notes are written by industry pundits who can make or break a winery with a score and review while others are written by wine novices trying to get their head around what they like and dislike in wine. Some tasting notes are added to blog posts, many to wine forums/bulletin boards, and still more to online wine communities.

At Scrugy, our challenge is to make sense of all these tasting notes. A daunting task indeed. So far we’ve done a pretty good job of letting you find tasting notes using Scrugy’s search engine. Also, some sites provide RSS feeds of their tasting notes that Scrugy can use to further narrow its focus. However, whether the tasting note is in the middle of a web page, buried in a bulletin board post, or part of a feed, isolating the vital and relevant parts of the tasting note among the surrounding content is nearly impossible. What we’re talking about here is basic information about the wine (vintage, producer, region), the score for the wine, information about the reviewer, and some impressions on the wine. Well, this effort just go a whole lot easier today with Scrugy’s support for the hReview microformat.

One of the more promising concepts in the Web 2.0 movement is the idea of a semantic web. That is, delivering content that is both meaningful to humans and computers. At the center of the semantic web are microformats. Put simply, microformats are lightweight and open data formats that build upon existing standards. There are microformats defined for representing people & organizations, events, social networks, tags, lists, reviews, and more. Microformats can be used anywhere well-formed (X)HTML is found, including web pages and RSS feeds.

So what does this have to do with tasting notes? By simply annotating a tasting note as an hReview on web pages, blog posts, forum posts, and feed items, Scrugy can pick up the detailed information it needs to properly index the tasting note. Let’s look at an example.

Here is the HTML for a simple tasting note as it may appear on a web page or in a blog post.

<div>
  <h1>2004 Navarro Pinot Noir Anderson Valley</h1>
  <p>Score: 5 out of 5</p>
  <blockquote>
    This vintage is intense: lots of berry, cherry flavors with
    a patina of toasty oak.
  </blockquote>
  <p>
    Reviewed by <a href="http://.../ted">Ted</a>
    on September 3, 2005
  </p>
</div>

Now the same tasting note annotated as an hReview would look something like this (additions in bold):

<div class="hreview“>
  <h1 class=”item“>2004 Navarro Pinot Noir Anderson Valley</h1>
  <p>Score: <abbr class=”rating” title=”5“>5 out of 5</abbr></p>
  <blockquote class=”description“>
    This vintage is intense: lots of berry, cherry flavors with
    a patina of toasty oak.
  </blockquote>
  <p class=”reviewer vcard“>
    Reviewed by <a class=”url fn” href=”http://…/ted”>Ted</a> on
    <abbr class=”dtreviewed” title=”20050903“>
      September 3, 2005
    </abbr>
  </p>
</div>

So with the addition of just a few class attributes and the <abbr> tag to the HTML, we now have a tasting note that is formatted just like the original but has the advantage of being computer readable. The “hreview” class name is what indicates that the nested content refers to a review (a review of a wine in our case). Nested within this element are elements with the pre-defined microformat classes ”item”, “rating”, “description”, “reviewer”, and “dtreviewed”. These classes tell us the name of the item being reviewed, the rating or score, a description of the review, who reviewed the item, and when it was reviewed. Instead of an opaque sequence of HTML tags, Scrugy can now interpret this markup as a tasting note and index it as such.

Although this example is simple, it does illustrate how seamlessly existing markup can be microformat-enabled without imposing restrictions on how it is displayed. And just as tools have evolved to make it easy for anyone to work with HTML to create blogs and web pages, new tools will emerge that make it easy for us to generate microformatted content as well. In fact, look for a new tools section on Scrugy that will, among other things, allow you to author a tasting note suitable for pasting into your favorite page editor or submission tool.

Stay tuned…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 9:44 pm by james and is filed under Announcements, New Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.