It’s exciting to see other folks starting to pick up on the potential of the semantic web and wine. At Scrugy we’ve already laid the groundwork for mining microcontent embedded in web pages and RSS feeds. In fact, the first phase has already been implemented in our wine-smart web crawler and feed aggregation services where we are harvesting wine review information from tasting notes formatted using microformats.

So what else is possible with the marriage of microformats and wine related content? Well, here is a glimpse of our roadmap in this area.

We see tremendous potential in the development of open specifications for representing lots of other structured wine information. For example, on winery web sites alone the hCard/adr and geo microformats can be used when displaying contact information, tasting room addresses, and GPS coordinates. In addition, hCalendar can be used when listing winery events and hListing when listing wine releases.  Of course, wine retail sites can also use hListing.

The possibilities for developing applications that leverage this information are very exciting. Let’s consider what’s possible with a site like Scrugy. Since Scrugy is an aggregator of wine information, it will automatically pick up winery addresses, geo coordinates, events, wine releases, and so on from winery sites that are using microformats when they’re crawled. That means these wineries will only be responsible for keeping their websites up-to-date and will no longer have the chore of propagating updated information out to the many sites that list information on them. Essentially what we’re talking about here is turning the current model inside out where wineries will no longer have to push data out but instead tools like Scrugy can come and get the information. Updates are then more timely and perhaps most importantly the distributed information is more accurate.

Circling back to tasting notes and microformats, the advantages for the wine consumer are equally appealing. At the end of my last post on HDTNs (High Definition Tasting Notes), I touched on the power of aggregating structured wine review information. Consider the situation where a tasting note aggregator such as Scrugy has developed a detailed tasting descriptor profile for a particular wine. This profile would be the result of summarizing tasting notes from several sites and employing an authority weighting for tasting notes from reviewers of distinction (critics, wine makers, and so on). Then consider a wine newbie who comes along and can only tell you the name of a wine that they liked. Scrugy can take the dominant tasting descriptors from that wine and find different wines with similar profiles. This opens the door to extremely powerful and accurate wine recommendations and the opportunity to discover wines from producers and regions that previously may never had been thought possible.

So of the other Web/Wine 2.0 companies out there, who is ready to take the next step? Andrea Johnston with Inertia Beverage Group is already calling this “Wine 3.0″.  Is there anyone willing to join me in defining open specifications for bringing the semantic web and wine together? I’d be happy to host a wiki to get things going.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 10:25 pm by james and is filed under Our Take. 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.