Re: Metadata and the Internet as Communities Network

On Sat, 4 Oct 1997, Al Gilman wrote:

> 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

> 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.

The Dublin Core metadata element "Coverage" offers a Placename
subelement which could encode e.g. "Minnesota", either as 
free text or using a defined vocabulary from a gazetteer.
Other subelements x,y allow a geographic location lat/long
or a more precisely defined polygonal area.
ISO/DIS 3166-2 (countries and their subdivisions) may be considered for
the Placename element.

Dublin Core elements may currently be embedded in HTML using the 
META tag, but elements are unstructured (it is difficult to define
inheritance between different elements, for instance). RDF offers a
structured metadata syntax using XML, and may perhaps be embeddable
within HTML before XML is fully deployed. RDF does not address the
metadata content.

Syntax of specific Dublin Core elements are available in Draft form - start
from http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core/

Andrew Daviel
TRIUMF & Vancouver-Webpages

Received on Friday, 10 October 1997 14:38:25 UTC