Another Microformat Idea - Measurement
I mentioned earlier that I’ve been thinking about a proposal for a Microformat for medical data - dosages of medications, medical procedures, diseases. It still needs some thought, but having looked through what’s out there now, I think what could be better suited is further extrapolation of something that’s already in the pipeline - the recipe Microformat.
A recipe has ingredients that are measured out, just as a person can be given medications in measured doses. And while the instructions of a recipe aren’t exactly a mirror of medical procedures, they could be similar. What I think we need are markups for measurements in general.
Medical procedures already done to a person could be marked up as hCal files, so that’s a pretty easy solution. But what about going in the opposite direction, and plotting out the steps that you should follow in the future? Can that be just an ordered list?
I think that the measurements will be the critical part of my whole idea - whether it’s extracted from recipes or it becomes its own and recipe includes it, like hResume includes hCard and hCal.
I’m reading up on the process for proposing a new Microformat to figure out where to go from here. I’d like to talk to some people who have more exprience in this and see if the idea has any merit, if I’ve overlooked it, or if I’m just crazy. One of the first things they mention in the directions is to make your idea as simple as possible. I think that a format for measurement could apply in a lot of situations - weather, recipes, medications, maps. Is it too simple? I’ll look further tomorrow to if it’s been discussed earlier, maybe I’m on the wrong track and don’t realize it yet.
