Re: Meta Tags

Eric Miller (emiller@oclc.org)
Fri, 24 Jan 1997 10:52:42 -0500


Danny Sullivan writes:
> > If I am not confused some Meta Tags are used for helping robots to indexing
> > your web site well, can someone say to my, what tags I have to include in
> > my page code for help the robots.
>
> You'll find a primer here
>
> http://www.pcweek.com/ir/0113/13jia.html

Danny (et.al.),

Thanks for forwarding this information. After reading this and the
subsequent links, etc. It seems clear that

1) There is no clear consensus for how one would describe an object.
2) Liberal use of the word "standard".

This aside, two other proposals that haven't been mentioned are

1) For resource description:

The Dublin Core <URL:http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core> and
for how to encode this in HTML, from A work group consensus from the
Distributed Indexing/Searching Workshop, MIT, May 28-29, 1996
<URL:http://www.oclc.org:5046/~weibel/html-meta.html>

2) For rating:

PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection)
<URL:http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/>

----

Encoding issues aside for the moment... There are currently many
active groups trying to best provide descriptive information
necessary for content selection on the Internet. These "metadata"
initiatives range from resource description, ratings, trust
management, intellectual property rights, terms and conditions, etc.

Question: Is there similar work being done in the robots world? In
essence, a consensus of elements from those harvesting the information
that would facilitate the collection and assimilation of electronic
objects? It strikes me that there is indeed overlap between the robot
communities and several of the above mentioned. For example,
'Last-Modified' Date and 'Content-Type' are examples of fields that
are both useful for the resource description community (aids in the
user selection process) as well as harvesting (should this be
re-indexed). Are there other that are unique to this group that would
facilitate harvesting?

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

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