RE: Common Metadata (was:RE: RDF in XHTML)

<- Yeah, I think that is the point -- metadata like "author" you probably
<- want to be able to ship around with a document; if you want those 10,000
<- different documents to be published on your website, where 10,000,000
<- people may download documents and want to know who the author is,
<- embedding the metadata in the page is nice.

Why are you talking of shipping documents around? The documents are surely
there to be read, not for copies to be downloaded - the publishing model is
different when you have connectivity.

The metadata is there to make the information available - machine
accessible.

<- What about a server-side include?  This problem sounds to me to be very
<- similar to the idea of someone wanting to include a copyright statement
<- at the bottom of every page without having to update and maintain every
<- page.  If you have a more sophisticated content-management system like
<- Interwoven, this can be automatic, but a low-tech way is to manually
<- create the author statements and <!-- #include
<- file="author_a_fragment.rdf" --> (or something like that).

Why is everyone so keen to hack? RDF is a tool at the early stages of its
development. If there are things it needs to do that aren't possible with
the current version [*] then now is the time to add the capabilities.

I think that
<- solutions like this or the database ideas proposed are good in the
<- short-term, because the RDF received by the client is then fairly simple
<- (IOW, these solutions do not require the clients to understand things
<- like multiple inheritance, do not require dereferencing of extra
<- resources, etc.)

If we want it simple, why not just use HTML meta tags? But why should the
RDF be simple? Ok, maybe some clients may only understand the 'author', but
others may want to make use of addition information, perhaps included
through other linked documents.

[*] I no longer think the inheritance-type thang is appropriate for the
RDF(S) level.

Received on Sunday, 22 April 2001 01:12:24 UTC