Re: We need a META schema registry!

At 10:54 AM 3/18/97 -0500, Michael Mealling wrote:

>It's the high end users and companies that need the real metadata
>system (and registry) that are the ones that are going to pay
>the large amounts of money for servers and systems. Those are
>different market forces for different markets.

That's true.  We're developing search products with substantial
meta-information capabilities because our customers want them.  We will
support open standards, but it's tough to decide which way(s) to go.  We
certainly like Apple MCF as an interchange standard, but we also expect
there to be other approaches.  I haven't seen much discussion that takes
meta-information as far as it really is going to go, in terms of the
breadth, depth and potential uses.  Librarians have the best grasp of the
issues because they swim in meta-information.  We are involving librarians
as well as Web technologists and publishers in our product design process.
It's going to take a creative compromise of these many interests to make
standards real.

Here's an example of the breadth and depth of meta-information: every time a
user saves a bookmark to a page, especially in a named subcategory, that's
at least one piece of meta-information.  That categorization is usually
valuable at least to the individual who created it, if not others.

Nick Arnett

---------------------------------------
Verity Inc. -- Connecting People with Information

Product Manager, Categorization and Visualization
408-542-2164; fax 408-541-1600; home office 408-733-7613
http://www.verity.com

Verity Inc.
894 Ross Drive
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Received on Tuesday, 18 March 1997 11:25:36 UTC