Menace

Sunday, 29th April 2007, No Comments »

Microformated E-Government

There’s been a lot of talk lately about using microformats and other ‘common markup methods‘ for Government sites. The idea being that services like TheyWorkForYou could become ‘better’ by using a common format to scrape government sites (so very web 3.0).

Taking it further

I began to think that Government sites could take the idea further and create a set of microformats based on 16.2 Minimum content of homepages and 16.3 Minimum content within “About this Site”. After a looking closely at developing a draft, I came to the conclusion that the minimum content is so small, has limited reusable and potentially duplicating existing microformats that it wouldn’t be worth implementing.

So now what?

We could follow Jason Ryan’s example of publishing media releases in hrelease and start using existing microformats such as rel=”license” for linking to the site’s Crown Copyright statement and Copyright of third parties.