Re: meta information

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Date: Thu, 2 Jun 1994 19:08:16 +0200
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From: nicka@mccmedia.com (Nick Arnett/Multimedia Computing Corp.)
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Subject: Re: meta information
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At 11:20 AM 6/2/94 -0500, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:

>Yes: we need to be able to express more machine-readable semantic
>information in documents, but NO, I don't think META is the
>way to do it.
>
>A semantic network represented by typed links is the mechanism
>I see emerging. Using HyTime markup, we might write:
>
>        <ilink linkends="billgates microsoft" anchroles="officer corporation">
>        <urlloc id=billgates>public-figure:/Gates/William</urlloc>
>        <urlloc id=microsoft>corporation:/USA/Microsoft</urlloc>
>
>        <a linkend=billgates>Bill Gates</a>, chairman
>        of <a linkend=microsoft>Microsoft</a> announced today...

Hmm.  I'm already doing that kind of tagging -- creating links to
background documents and such, using URLs.  I'm interested in creating tags
that *aren't* links, for the kinds of purposes that META is also intended
for -- automatic creation of new indexes, etc.  In other words, not
anchors, just semantic tags.

This would allow, for example, an investment company to have a proprietary
file on Microsoft (don't we all?) that's automatically linked to incoming
tagged news articles.  More important, the system that processes incoming
articles could see that a company is mentioned for which there is no
backgrounder, which would trigger a search of public sources.

But then again, I've never delved into HyTime in any depth at all, so maybe
I'm misunderstanding what's going on in your example.

In any event, I *really* would like to see explicit support for this sort
of thing in HTML.  Headers are a good place to start, though, so perhaps we
shouldn't go too far with this discussion until the original issue
regarding META reaches some resolution.

BTW, one of the things I might stick into META elements would be lists of
all of the companies mentioned in an article, all of the people, all of the
products, all of the fizzbins, etc.  Getting that sort of information --
the names of the META elements and the lists of items in them -- in
response to the HEAD request would be of great benefit to navigation
automation.

Nick


Multimedia Computing Corp. (strategic consulting)
Campbell, California
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