Mida now supports Ruby v1.9.3 and thanks to Sam Granieri v2.0. There is also a change to parse_source() which will now output the exception error message if raised.

This version now contains all the schema.org datatypes, enumerations and vocabularies. This was achieved by scraping the site using schema.org_scraper to create a JSON and YAML representation of the types. These are hosted on github so that the changes can easily be tracked.

The main problem that I did encounter was that the Enumeration type conflicts with the explanation in the Getting started Guide. In the type list, it says that Enumeration is a vocabulary derived from Thing, whereas in the explanation it says to uses the <link> tag to specify the value of the enumeration. The latter makes a lot more sense as otherwise it is unclear which property should be used to specify the value. I have therefore created an Enumeration DataType, which can be subclassed to create an Enumeration with specified valid values, as in the following:

# The publication format of the book.
class BookFormatType < Mida::DataType::Enumeration
  VALID_VALUES = [
    [::Mida::DataType::URL, %r{http://schema.org/EBook}i],
    [::Mida::DataType::URL, %r{http://schema.org/Hardcover}i],
    [::Mida::DataType::URL, %r{http://schema.org/Paperback}i]
  ]
end

To see the complete list of changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG.

After looking at the best way to implement the recently released schema.org Vocabularies, I decided to allow vocabularies to be included into other vocabularies. This would not only reduce repetition when specifying the same properties repeatedly, but would also allow vocabularies that include another vocabulary to be used in place of that vocabulary. It is used as follows:

class Thing < Mida::Vocabulary
  itemtype %r{http://example.com/vocab/thing}i
  has_one 'name', 'description'
end

class Book < Mida::Vocabulary
  itemtype %r{http://example.com/vocab/book}i
  include_vocabulary Thing
  has_one 'title', 'author'
end

class Collection < Mida::Vocabulary
  itemtype %r{http://example.com/vocab/collection}i
  has_many 'item' do
    extract Thing
  end
end

In the above if you gave a Book as an item of Collection this would be accepted because it includes the Thing vocabulary. When examining the item you would find #vocabulary set to Book and you would have access to all the properties of Thing and all the properties of Book.

This release also has a small bug fix so that mida no longer defaults to searches for %r{} and will only make searches if a type regexp is given.

The big addition for this release is a command-line tool, mida.

To use the tool, supply it with the urls or filenames that you would like to be parsed (by default each item is output as yaml):

  mida http://lawrencewoodman.github.com/mida/news/

If you want to search for specific types you can use the -t switch followed by a Regular Expression:

  mida -t /person/i http://lawrencewoodman.github.com/mida/news/

For more information look at mida’s help:

  mida -h

To see the complete list of changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG.

The new release includes quite a few refinements such as auto registering the vocabularies via the inherited hook and adding various DataTypes such as Boolean, Float, ISO8601Date, etc. To improve output when using pp or y on Item#to_h the vocabulary has been removed.

There are a couple of changes to watch out for:

• When describing a vocabulary types has been deprecated in favour of extract. This was done in case greater flexibility was needed at a later date by providing extract with a block. If this happens extract would make more sense as a name.
• String can no longer be used as a type when describing a Vocabulary, instead use DataType::Text
• Properties marked as has_one now output a single value instead of an Array
• Document#search now only uses a Regexp to search with as this greatly simplified the code

The project would benefit from greater collaboration, to aid this Bundler support has been added.

To see the complete list of changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG.

The main change for this release is that you can now describe vocabularies to conform to. These are set out by subclassing VocabularyDesc as in the following:

class Rating < Mida::VocabularyDesc
  itemtype %r{http://example\.com.*?rating$}i
  has_one 'best', 'value'
end

class Comment < Mida::VocabularyDesc
  itemtype %r{http://example\.com.*?comment$}i
  has_one 'commentor', 'comment'
end

class Review < Mida::VocabularyDesc
  itemtype %r{http://example\.com.*?review$}i
  has_one 'itemreviewed'
  has_one 'rating' do
    types Rating, String
  end
  has_many 'comments' do
    types Comment
  end
end

There were also a few implementation changes. To see the complete list of changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG.

This release fixes a few bugs where itemprops were not being parsed properly if they contained non-microdata elements. It also will now recognize itemprops nested within other itemprops.

This is the first release of Mida. It was written after hearing rumours of Google making increasing use of Microdata; if this turns out to be true then more sites will in-turn make use of it and a Microdata parser will become very useful.