RE: How to describe Flowcharts, Schematics, etc

Note: This is crossposted from Web Accessibility Interst Group, where there
has been a discussion about describing flowcharts and other schematic
diagrams, to the RDF Interest Group who are likely to provide some useful
insight.

What we are trying to do is create the "science" that can provide as much
support as possible to the "art".

I have taken an example from SVG - scalable vector graphics. For people who
are interested in seeing the effect there are several open-source renderers
available already - see http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG for more information.

What I have done is to use metadata to describe the fact that two of the
objects in the image are connectors, and say what they connect.

The hope is that it is possible to use a metadata reader to generate the
description of the image, by finding descriptions of the different things
which are connected, and being able to say "a typical desktop PC (ComputerA)  
is connected by a twisted-pair cable (CableA) to another object (hub)".

The idea is that there are objects identified by names (CableA), (ComputerA),
(hub) with descriptive text (in the case of ComputerA and CableA) in the SVG
source. There is metadata - stuff that machines can read, which says that the
thing called CableA is a connection between ComputerA and hub, just as there
is metadata that an RDF-aware search engine can use to discover that there
are three creators of this document.

The example is at http://www.w3.org/1999/08/29-network.svg

Charles McCN

On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, Bruce Bailey wrote:

  David, et al.,
  
  Audio description is art as much as science. 
[and some more]

Received on Sunday, 29 August 1999 23:48:17 UTC