Re: Meta info tags (was Re: what finger tags?)

Tom Walsh (tomw@netcom.com)
Wed, 14 Sep 1994 00:54:39 +0200

In article narnett@verity.com (Nick Arnett) writes:

>At 9:09 PM 9/9/94 +0200, Rick Troth wrote:

>> So, again, what tags should we use? What do we want it to
>>look like when we convert the info from your_favourite_directory_engine
>>to HTML/SGML?

>We need some resolution on the entire tagging/META issue fairly soon. Our
>engine creates indexes that include document attributes, which typically
>are things like author, date created, etc. Our spider will extract some of
>them from the HTTP header, but it's also going to look in the HTML header.
>We are going to have to commit to some baseline specification very, very
>soon. One of our short-term goals, for example, is to build a searchable
>"virtual library" of documents on the Web that deal with the Web,
>publishing and libraries. We'd like to be able to tell the owners of their
>pages how to put tags into their headers so that our spider (and others)
>can gather the attributes. And we'll be doing that with our own documents,
>too.

>I wouldn't want to do anything that would be un-SGML-ish, but I'd also like
>to build a basic structure that won't rule out semantic and relational data
>models and cross-industry standards such as MARC.

I would think the ultimate solution is to have an index of the documents ( and
their associated attributes ) be a completely seperate querriable entity.
This would allow users ( consumers, other servers!! ) to query the index and
get the index results back. Then local relavance and cost based processing can
be performedon on the returned data. Once the consumer is satisfied with the
potential list of candidate hits they may retrieve them ( or just keep a link
to their existance ). Using this approach the current infastructure for
document retrieval can remain the same.

responses, flames, venture capital, job offers accepted :)

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