Re: New discussions

At 04:07 PM 4/21/97 -0700, Jon Bosak wrote:
>| Anyone with librarian expertise out there?
>
>During the workshop I pointed to three such systems that I have worked
>with: the Dewey decimal system, the Library of Congress system, and
>the numeric taxonomy of ideas developed by P. M. Roget in his famous
>thesaurus.  I have hardly begun to think this one through, but I'm
>already seeing that the library systems aren't suitable for Web
>indexing.  Roget's is in the right neighborhood but still not
>optimized for searching.
>
>One thing that came through quite clearly from the workshop and from
>subsequent discussions about stardardized lexicons (which could be
>another way to do this) is that we are not ready to start discussing
>the subject on this list.  I am deeply interested in
>indexing/searching and consider it to be part of the long-term charter
>for this group, but I would like to see any discussion of it take
>place off the list for the time being.  We have more basic things to
>deal with before we can bring this to the foreground of the XML
>effort.
>

I've taught in a School of Library and Information Science, but I hardly
think it qualiries me as having librarian experience. However, I can tell
you that a lot of attention in classifying/cataloging these days is on
metadata rather than on classification schemes like Dewey or LC.

Some of you may ave seen a notice of a metadata workshop
(http://www.lbl.gov/~olken/EPA/Workshop/call.html); there's also a metadata
coalition (supposedly at www.metadata.org, but the net's not showing DNS
response on that right now).

I know that in the U.S. Department of Energy we have decided to use SGML
for metadata on weapons records (sorry, closed servers, so I can't give you
the URLs). There's a DOE-wide DTD that's pretty generic, and I'm writing
one that's much more fine-grained for Oak RIdge. I'll be glad to discuss
the topic off-line, then filter stuff back into the XML group at some
point. I will say that DOE would like to make our DTDs work with XML if
possible.

Jim Mason



Dr. James D. Mason
(ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8 Convenor)
Lockheed Martin Energy Systems
Information Management Services
SGML Systems Development
1060 Commerce Park, M.S. 6480
Oak Ridge, TN  37831-6480   U.S.A.
Telephone: +1 423 574-6973
Facsimile:  +1 423 574-0004
Network: masonjd@ornl.gov
http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/wg8/wg8home.htm

Received on Thursday, 24 April 1997 17:44:24 UTC