Syndicated Web Ratings - an Idea Whose Time has Come?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Syndicated Web Ratings - an Idea Whose Time has Come?
This is a good idea that comes up from time to time (I mention it in my Resource Profiles paper). I doubt that we could ever have a standardized rating system (there will never be global agreement on 'accuracy' or 'family-friendliness') but ratings metadata can be pretty simply encoded. Here is a simple pseudo-schema (similar in many ways to the hreview microformat) that would do the job:
Rating:
- Item - item being rated (identified by URI)
- Scheme - rating scheme being used (eg., LDS family-friendliness scale)
- Field - field (eg. language use)
- Value - value (eg., 'mild profanity')
- Author - person doing the rating (identified by OpenID)
- Date - date reviewed Aggregating these provides you with a set of ratings on various resources. You can then assemble views (or 'profiles') of the resource, depending on what rating systems you use, what people you depend on for the ratings, etc. This is how we'll do it, eventually - it's just a matter of people collecting ratings and posting them as simple XML. More...