- From: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:41:27 -0400
- To: "www-tag@w3.org WG" <www-tag@w3.org>
In response to my own call for use cases (I'm still waiting for Atom and POWDER scenarios): Uniform access to descriptions: Document publisher use case Acme Publishing is an established publisher of academic journals serving thousands of hits on its corpus of PDF files daily. It has learned about RDF and in order to promote its journals wishes to provide bibliographic information for its articles in RDF, to assist automated agents that are RDF-aware. Although the PDF files have a place to put metadata, this is deemed an unsuitable location as (1) many of its millions of PDF articles are quite old and regenerating them is so risky as to be infeasible, and (2) Acme judges that it is unreasonable to expect that client software will know how to parse a PDF to get at the metadata. Acme's first approach is to create a CGI script that takes the article's URI as input and returns the bibliographic RDF for that article. This gets few adopters and the publisher realizes that monolithic action will not be very effective. At a trade conference they realize that other publishers are having the same thought, and there is discussion of how they can standardize so that agents can be generic across various publishers - indeed over the whole web. Minimal modifications to its web server, such as CGI scripts, special response headers, or new HTTP request methods are within budget. Asking existing customers to change the URLs they're already using, or to change the way they use HTTP, is not acceptable.
Received on Monday, 24 March 2008 18:42:11 UTC