RE: Contents

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc cu-portland edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Mueth [mailto:d-mueth@uchicago.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2000 3:20 PM
> To: Gregory Leblanc
> Cc: gnome-doc-list@gnome.org
> Subject: RE: Contents
> 
> 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? 

Not particularly, it was something very cool that I've looked at a little,
but everything I know about it is from 20 minutes that I spent on the
webpage.  I'll forward this on to Paul Jones, and perhaps he can write
something that we can share with both the GDP and the LDP, to answer some of
our questions.

> 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? 

That was the impression that I had from reading the pages, although I
suspect that there might be a couple of elements that we're missing, maybe
that's just lack of sleep on my part.

> 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.

I've got a question on this, specifically with the "multiple document
versions" that you mention.  I'm not sure what kind of history is kept with
this, if any at all.  Do you see some way of using this to help alleviate
the problems with using online documentation that is a newer version than
what pertains to the application installed on a users machine, and if so,
how?  Thanks,
	Greg