Re: Geographic Tags in HTML

To get over the "complex type" hump, Dublin Core Metadata Inititative has 
recently voted to approve use of several encoding schemes for the spatial 
aspects of the DC element "Coverage" - specifically these are 

TGN - Thesaurus of Gegraphic Names - http://shiva.pub.getty.edu/tgn_browser/
ISO3166 - country names - ftp://dkuug.dk/i18n/ISO_3166
DCMI Box - a DCMI encoding - http://purl.net/net/csiro-metadata/dcbox/
DCMI Point - a DCMI encoding - http://purl.net/net/csiro-metadata/dcpoint/

These provide tools to solve some of the problem that you are dealing with.  
But interoperability is achieved, as with all things DC, only if the community 
actually uses these schemes consistently and indicates that they are using them.  

I'm currently co-editting the DCMI recommendation dealing with a complete 
"round 1" set of qualifiers for the DC Metadata Element Set.  

BTW - the new schemes DCMI Box and DCMI Point come with a couple of 
recommended notations - using XML and also one without angle-brackets, 
but there is certainly a case for an RDF notation too.  Also, there was 
one comment that some pieces from MathML might have been re-used, but 
this seemed to introduce more complexity than it solved *for the application*. 
-- 
Best		Simon Cox