> > Let's keep in mind that various information domains use quite different
> > ontologies and thus will use different sets of META tags. For example, the
> > financial community will use quite a different set from the biology
> > community. This is why we have librarians at the standards meetings;
> > they've been struggling with these issues for years (and sometimes become
> > testy when we techno-dweebs oversimplify!)
>
> Sure. But unlike the (now defunct) HTML-WG, the real world needs something
> that works *TODAY*. And it must be above all *SIMPLE* and easy for
> non-experts to use. Library indexing schemes meet neither requirement.
These issues that are outlined here have been one of the underlying
foundations behind the Metadata Workshop Series. These workshops have...
"convened selected professionals from diverse but related fields of
computer science, librarianship, online information services,
abstracting and indexing, imaging and geospatial data, museum and
archive control, and others, to address and advance the state of the
art in the development and extension of methods, standards, and
protocols to facilitate the description, organization, discovery, and
access of network information resources." (whew)...
The results from these workshops include the The Dublin Core, simple
resource description for digital objects, and The Warwick Framework, a
recognition and a proposed framework for associating different types
of metadata with a particular object.
More information on this can be found at
<URL:http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core>
Additionall, with regard to encoding this information in HTML, a
proposed convention that reflected the consensus of a break-out group
at the W3C Distributed Indexing and Searching Workshop, May 28-29,
1996, concerning tagging of meta information in HTML can be found
<URL:http://www.oclc.org:5046/~weibel/html-meta.html>
Hope this helps...
eric j. miller <URL:http://purl.oclc.org/net/eric>
emiller@oclc.org Office of Research, OCLC, Inc.
emiller@cis.ohio-state.edu Dept. of Geography, The Ohio State University