- From: Michael Mealling <michaelm@rwhois.net>
- Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 10:18:51 -0500
- To: w3c-dist-auth@www10.w3.org
Ralph R. Swick wrote: > > On 1/30/97, Larry Masinter wrote: > >... > >"Representing the Dublin Core within X.500, LDAP and CLDAP" > >... > >I think it would make a good addition to the WEBDAV home page. > > Good pointer, Larry. There is also a proposal in the works to > extend PICS values (dropping the values are rational number > restriction) specifically to be able to use PICS as a transfer > syntax for Dublin Core -- and other -- metadata. See > > http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/970113/DigiLib/pics970113.htm Everyone should also be aware that the group that developed the Dublin Core has extended the model to include some transport concepts. The best discussion of this proposal can be found in the Dlib article that discusses the entire approach: <URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlib/dlib/july96/07weibel.html> The basic summary is that there should be things called containers that hold metadata of different types. Then there is some type of relationship entity that shows the relationships between different containers. One of the approaches uses MIME's multipart/related. In addition to the X.500/LDAP/CLDAP approach there is also the application/directory MIME type that the directory services folks are working on. For very flat and what I consider low overhead metadata this approach gives you the ability to handle community specific metadata to some degree as well as encodings and character sets. The application/directory stuff is described in: <URL:http://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-asid-mime-direct-03.txt> With all of this in mind I'm becoming increasingly worried that with so many parallel metadata transport/encoding methods that we may be fracturing a part of the infrastructure that desperately needs some commonality. While it is increasingly obvious that there is no concensus for an end-all-be-all metadata format there does seem to be concensus that they should be transported as MIME objects and that we should standardize on a few formats and schema (classes?) As far as WebDAV is concerned we should take a look at each of these current metadata proposals with an eye for how WebDAV can act as the primary seed for filling in each of these containers. Since WebDAV is currently the part of the infrastructure that is closest to the author then we should make the metadata formats as flexible as possible. Thanks! -MM
Received on Friday, 31 January 1997 10:22:43 UTC