RE: Contents

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

> > Can anyone come out with a suggested format? It obviously should
> > containt title, version number, brief description, format
> > (man/info/html/DOcBook/plain text), file location (both local and
> > internet), and probably more.  jrb, elliot: do you have any 
> > suggestions?
> > 
> > AFter we have a proposed format, we can try to discuss it with LDP and
> > KDE people. 
> 
> Anybody here familiar with the OMF metadata framework?
> http://metalab.unc.edu/osrt/omf/  The first time that I looked at it, I
> wasn't impressed, but I was a bit more thorough, and it looks really slick.
> I'll have to ask Paul Jones, or one of his crew to see where they're at with
> things.  This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but there are some
> strong similarities.
> 	Greg

Greg,

Do you feel comfortable summarizing this for us?  At a quick glance, it
looks like a specification for a separate XML file which describes a
document in terms of authorship, version, title, format, location, etc.  
Is this right?  I get the impression the main point here is that you
specify a location, so that while any server can hold many metadata files,
the actual documents are spread across the web. Thus, the main purpose is
to be able to search for and download documentation which is distributed
on a network.  Is this right? 

If implemented properly, a solution like this could solve not only our
Contents problem but would also help us deal with having multiple document
versions and documents which are stored on the internet.  For the Contents
problem, we presumably would need to use the Subject or Keyword tags along
with a standard classification scheme.  If this is the right way to go, it
might be better to add a contents tag and distribute a well-defined
contents classification system.

Dan