Re: Open Issues -- Attributes

Judith Slein wrote:
> 
> At 08:43 PM 2/7/97 PST, Yaron Goland wrote:
> 
> >1. It is impossible to require that the end of a link point back to its
> >source as this could require a server to server interaction and we do
> >not wish to involve ourselves in those issues. As has been previously
> >indicated, server to server issues are a quagmire and we don't want to
> >get stuck there. It is felt we can provide a useful specification w/out
> >having to deal w/server to server.
> 
> Speaking for the document management camp, attributes are centrally
> important to the services we provide.  And probably the most important use
> of attributes for us is as a way to search for documents.  That means that
> we have to be able to figure out what document a given attributes belongs
> to.  Will Microsoft have an interest in this, too?  You can already assign
> attributes, including custom attributes, to documents created by MS tools.
> Surely the day is coming when it will be possible to search based on the
> values of those attributes.  Will the Web be part of this picture?

Searching is one part of metadata (and one of the ones I'm interested
in)
but there are so many other applications that all depend on the metadata
being there. We have to get the metadata creation as close to the actual
resource origination point as possible in order to get good data in 
the system. This is why I think we have to make sure we get it right.

> I'll send separate mail on the Warwick Framework which tries to do some
> bundling of attributes, potentially using MIME multipart content to do the
> bundling.

The Warwick Framework would be my suggestion as well. Now whether or not
that Warwick collection is bound to the resource(s) by a link or by
some other method ( a META method? ) is argueable. I don't think the
metadata should be part of the resource since metadata can change 
without the resource changing. 

Anyway, I just wanted to re-iterate what Judith said since WEBDAV
has the greatest opportunity to actually do metadata correctly...

-MM

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Received on Tuesday, 11 February 1997 11:52:54 UTC