Re: Metadata and the Internet as Communities Network

Thanks Steven,

We're working on a community webpage and fund it with business 
sponsors of an annual street fair. Having our third event today,
see http://www.fivepointsfestival.com, and take the "Community"
button. We'll have pictures of todays event up next week.

We plan to merge the local art, dance, film, and music scene
with regional and international content. We're hosting small,
local non-profits for free. Lots of flux on our pages just
now, but we've just begun.

Thanks for the info,

Phil Griffin



Steven Clift wrote:
> 
> For those who received my previous posts about "turning the Internet
> into a communities network in its nature" the URL about Metadata
> from the W3 consortium seems very important.  The technical
> details are beyond me but in the end HTML editors will likely
> integrate ways to help name your WWW documents in standardized ways.
> This will help others catalog and index the WWW for searching in more
> advanced ways.
> 
> I am particularly interested in how this will bring geography as an
> option onto the WWW.  For example I'd like to be able to assign a
> virtual longitude and latitude point to my home page.  I'd like to be
> able to search just the WWW pages in Minnesota or in my neighborhood
> for that matter.  I'd like to be able to find e-mail lists, WWW
> forums, online chats based on geography and other reliable factors.  From
> a democracy and community perspective, geography is essential to making
> the Internet a real tool for local community building.
> 
> Anyway, here is the link to the Metadata section of the W3 and their
> press release (which is include in part below):
> 
>         http://www.w3.org/Metadata/
>         http://www.w3.org/Press/RDF
> 
> If anyone involved with these efforts could share their ideas on how
> local communities, regions, and countries should prepare leverage
> this scheme to promote community content and interaction, that would
> be much appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> Steven Clift
> Democracies Online - http://www.e-democracy.org/do
> 
> P.S. My original post on this theme is at:
> http://www.mtn.org/edem-elect/archive/msg01890.html
> When you combine this with the current battles over who will control
> the set-top box/operating system for digital television, imagine how
> standard metatags could allow a person to pre-determine which
> broadcast WWW pages to cache for later use.  (If the 6MB digital stream
> for HDTV gives way to 6 broadcast quality digital feeds, imagine if only
> one of those channels was split further into text and multimedia WWW
> content.  This then relates to the battle for push standards on the
> Internet - because in the end this may really be the battle for control of
> broadcasting as the Internet takes parts of it over. :-) )  My post on
> Community Digital Broadcasting may be of interest:
> http://www.mtn.org/edem-elect/archive/msg01998.html
> 
> And from the W3 press release:
> 
> World Wide Web Consortium
> Publishes Public Draft of Resource
> Description Framework (RDF)
> 
> Key Industry Players Collaborate to Develop
> Interoperable Metadata for the Web
> 
> For immediate release
>   Contact America ---
> 
>   The Weber Group
> 
>   Anne Potts <apotts@webergroup.com>
>   Eric Snow <esnow@webergroup.com>
> 
>   +1 617 661-7900
>   +1 617 661-0024 (fax)
>                                        Contact Europe --
> 
>                                        Andrew Lloyd & Associates
> 
>                                        Ned Mitchell <ned@ala.com> +33
>                                        1 43 22 79 56
> 
>                                        Andrew Lloyd <allo@ala.com> +44
>                                        127 367 5100
> 
> CAMBRIDGE, MASS., USA -- October 3, 1997 -- The World Wide Web
> Consortium (W3C) today announced the first public draft of a
> work-in-progress of the Resource Description Framework (RDF),
> providing interoperability between applications that exchange
> machine-understandable information on the Web. "The development of RDF
> illustrates the power of the collaborative process within W3C Working
> Groups" said Ralph Swick, W3C Metadata Project Manager. "Beginning
> with a functional requirement from an end-user Member, the RDF Working
> Group brought together additional Members to work to achieve a
> solution of which everyone can be proud." The W3C RDF Working Group
> has key industry players including DVL, Grif, IBM, KnowledgeCite,
> LANL, Microsoft, Netscape, Nokia, OCLC, Reuters, SoftQuad and
> University of Michigan.
> 
> The RDF Working Group is one of the earliest phases of a major effort
> by the Consortium to build a vendor-neutral and operating system-
> independent system of metadata. The collaborative design effort on RDF
> originated as an extension on the PICS content description technology,
> and draws upon the XML design as well as recent W3C Submissions by
> Microsoft [XML Web Collections] and Netscape [XML/MCF]. In addition,
> documents such as Microsoft's XML-Data and Site Map proposals, and the
> Dublin Core/Warwick Framework have also influenced the RDF design.
> 
> RDF will allow different application communities to define the
> metadata property set that best serves the needs of each community.
> RDF metadata can be used in a variety of application areas such as:
> 
>     in resource discovery to provide better search engine capabilities;
>     in cataloging for describing the content and content relationships
>     available at a particular Web site, page, or digital library; by
>     intelligent software agents to facilitate knowledge sharing and
>     exchange; in content rating for child protection and privacy
>     protection; in describing collections of pages that represent a
>     single logical "document"; for describing intellectual property
>     rights of Web pages.
> 
> With digital signatures, RDF will be key to building the "Web of
> Trust" for electronic commerce, collaboration, and other applications.
> 
> RDF will use XML as the transfer syntax in order to leverage other
> tools and code bases being built around XML.
> 
> This draft, describing the details of the RDF metadata model and
> syntax, will be presented next week at the semi-annual meeting of the
> Dublin Core group in Helsinki, Finland.
> 
> The RDF specification has been produced as part of the W3C Metadata
> Activity. For more information on RDF, see
> http://www.w3.org/Metadata/RDF
> 
> W3C Metadata Activity
> 
> Metadata means "data about data" or "information about information";
> more importantly it should now be taken to mean "machine
> understandable information on the Web". The Metadata Activity, which
> includes the RDF Working Group, was formed in 1997 from the
> recognition within the Consortium of a common subtask to existing
> activities such as PICS and DSig at W3C, HTTP and WebDAV work at IETF,
> the Dublin Core among many other projects.
> 
> W3C's Metadata Activity has seven major areas of focus:
> 
>  1.A metadata model and syntax specification, RDF;
>  2.A language for writing RDF schemas;
>  3.A language for expressing processing rules (sometimes called
>  "filters",
>     "preferences", or "profiles" in various applications of metadata)
>     for the use of RDF statements;
>  4.A language for expressing a general query for RDF information; 5.An
>  algorithm for canonicalizing RDF for digital signature; 6.A syntax
>  for digitally signing RDF; 7.A vocabulary for expressing PICS labels
>  in RDF, and a conversion algorithm
>     from PICS 1.1.
> 
> For more information on Metadata, see http://www.w3.org/Metadata/
> 
> [clipped bottom about W3 info.]
> -------------------------------------------------------
>      Steven L. Clift, Director, Democracies Online
>      3454 Fremont Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55408 USA
>      Tel: 612-824-3747  E: clift@freenet.msp.mn.us
> 
>   http://www.e-democracy.org/do/ - Democracies Online
>   http://freenet.msp.mn.us/people/clift/ -  Home Page
> -------------------------------------------------------

Received on Saturday, 4 October 1997 09:54:31 UTC