Hi Mike. That sounds like quite an expansion of the vision as I originally understood it, and a good approach, if ambitious! I had thought it was always about writing templates on the HTML (which users could do, and obviously still can), as opposed to the system looking for a hierarchy of data “sources” and using the best of them. Perhaps that relates to the spider, though.

The advantage with what you’ve started is that adapting to different data sources is under the control of a template developer i.e. Dan. Of course its strength is a work-around for reality, with the corresponding disadvantage that it requires, say, Dan to build templates for each variation, of which there’ll be many unless one can get agreement on some conventions. I’m just suggesting that your tool makes more apparent the advantage of institutions using some sort of (say) POSH convention, so that they don’t need to get you to create a new template for you to spider their stuff.

I ain’t got any aspirations for Gathery any more, really, but I am keeping a vague eye on microformats for generic objects still, and still wondering whether a very simple bit of POSH based on DC or CDWALite could be worth the candle. The microformat community (parts of it) pooh-poohed the idea of a DC-based uF, though as a very generic set of concepts it seemed to me pretty ideal. But hey, a bit of POSH doesn’t need them, and some GRDDL could get us a long way too.