Re: Metadata and the Internet as Communities Network

to follow up on what Steven Clift said:

>  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.

Yes, Steve, the W3C RDF project proposes to create a service
which will let you do what you want to do, associate your
web-accessible materials with a geographical locale, and use
geographical locale as a discriminant in retrieving others'
materials.

From your perspective as a consumer, RDF is still vaporware.  So
you want to encourage vendors to support "something like this"
and try to remember what it is that you want in brand-neutral
terms.  In that sense, RDF is a brand name.  "Geographical
relevance" is brand-neutral language.

The consumer interest in metainformation is best couched in
questions.  Metadata proposals say "I can associate your objects
with these facts."  The consumer needs to come to the table
saying "Can your solution answer these questions?"

--Al Gilman

Received on Saturday, 4 October 1997 12:19:30 UTC