How should EARL be used?

Hello

I am new to the group and have been listening in on the conference call for
the past few weeks.

One issue that I want to understand better is how EARL will be used. It
seems to me that there are several ways to use EARL. One being the
aggregation of several EARL reports to create a combined report. An example
of this, in the context of the tool I work on (WAVE), would be to perform a
WAVE evaluation producing an EARL report combined with an EARL report from
the W3C's HTML validator. This idea could be extended to comparing and
contrasting reports from other sources.

Another possible use, as I understand it, would be to link EARL reports to
the web page they represent. This would enable search engines or other tools
to use the EARL report as a source of meta data for the web page. Search
engines, for example, could then use the meta data for ranking purposes,
etc.

Shadi, during today's conference call, mentioned something about an EARL
repository. I did not quite understand the entire concept and it was off
topic so Shadi asked me to bring it to the list. I think it is part of the
bigger question, what are some of the other uses for EARL?

Thanks
Shane Anderson
WebAIM.org