Re: Where should you look for metadata?

> 1. What is the subject matter of the page?
> 2. Is it suitable for the young or easily-offended?
> 3. Is its content free, or does it require payment?

I'd say that these three would most likely be encoded in the resource, or
at least linked to from the resource by whatever means. Why would you trust
an outside resource to derive the subject matter of the page? Having said
that, <meta> tags are often abused too, but they could be seen as being
separate from the main content. Of course, for a lot of HTML pages, the
very notion of structured data breaks down...

> 4. Does the owner share any cookies or other personal information with
> other parties?
> 5. How highly have users rated the content?

Yes, these are most likely external resources. Like I say "Sometimes it
makes sense to encode data about at resource at that resource address, at
other times it doesn't."... some data about data is best left to external
resources, whereas other is best to derive from the resource itself.
There's a thing dividing line... but it is also wrong to say that a URL is
not a good place to store information about that URL: it simply depends on
a) the type of data, b) trust, c) the whim of the author.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
[ :name "Sean B. Palmer" ] :hasHomepage <http://infomesh.net/sbp/> .

Received on Friday, 16 February 2001 09:28:26 UTC