Re: meta information

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
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Date: Thu, 2 Jun 1994 22:25:37 +0200
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: meta information 
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In message <199406021856.LAA23834@nova.unix.portal.com>, Nick Arnett/Multimedia
 Computing Corp. writes:
>At 12:46 PM 6/2/94 -0500, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
>>
>>Why? It seems like a separate data format might work better for
>>your app.
>
>But the whole idea is to use the Web as a communications mechanism.  I
>don't particularly want to be off on my own island.

I didn't say anything about not using the Web. I just said you might
not want to use HTML. Lots of apps in the Web use GIF for images.
Because data is not represented in HTML hardly means it's not accessible
through the web.

>Perhaps a concrete example will help.  My main practical project right now
>is establishment of a net-based library for Sarajevo.  Its creation and
>maintenance will involve ex-Yugoslavians who are scattered all over the
>world, thanks to the diaspora.  I'm prototyping tools that will allow these
>people to collaborate on structuring and maintaining a set of information
>resources that reflects their collective points of view.  One of the areas
>in which they'll collaborate is in determining how the documents in the
>library are tagged for various purposes.

Great! When you get this thing ready for general use, I'd like
to use it to moderate the revision of the HTML spec!

Seriously... we are badly in need of a collaborative knowledge-base
editing tool. But it's a hard problem. I expect that building a tool
that works for the knowledge domain you're talking about _or_ the
knowledge domain I'm talking about is doable in the near term.

Building one that works for arbitrary knowledge domains isn't likely
to happen without a LOT of work.

That's why I see this semantic tagging stuff as an application-specific
need, and not something we need to be able to do within HTML.

Typed links on the other hand...

Dan