Re: Meta information

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Date: Tue, 7 Jun 1994 11:36:17 +0200
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From: Dave Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Meta information
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Gunter,

> I followed the Scribe (or BIBTEX) conventions as close as possible.
> The meta info will not be shown by a browser. But there will be problems
> when more meta info is needed, there is no way of further grouping the
> meta informations. Except putting everything in the value field like

> <META name="BIBTeX" value="@Book(Grimm,
>                                 author='Grimm',
>                                 title ='Little red riding hood')">

This kind of hierarchical info could be handled neatly with special
SGML elements. I am currently looking at how TEI handles this and
hope to come up with some concrete proposals later this month.

You can see the kind of thing that TEI allows in:

 a) The Classification Declaration - the <taxonomy> element

    http://etext.virginia.edu/bin/tei-tocs?div=DIV3&id=HD55

The <taxonomy> element has two slightly different, but related, functions.
For well-recognized and documented public classification schemes, such as
Dewey or other published descriptive thesauri, it contains simply a
bibliographic citation indicating where a full description of a particular
taxonomy may be found. For less easily accessible schemes, the <taxonomy>
element contains a description of the taxonomy itself as well as an optional
bibliographic citation.

This provides the means to define novel indexing schemes while preserving a
degree of interoperability. An alternative approach is to allow people to
define separate indexing DTDs and let each document specify which such DTD is
being used. Interoperability then rears its head, and can perhaps be assuaged
through the use of shared architectural forms.

 b) The Text Classification

    http://etext.virginia.edu/bin/tei-tocs?div=DIV3&id=HD43

This is used to classify particular documents using schemes that have been
declared via the <taxonomy> element. Thus a document can be classified by
reference to the Dewey Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress
Classification, or any other system widely used in library and documentation
work. Alternatively, the document can be classified by providing a set of
keywords as defined by say the British Library, or by referencing any other
taxonomy of text categories recognized in the field concerned, or peculiar to
the material in hand.

The home page for TEI is http://etext.virginia.edu/TEI.html
--
Best wishes,

Dave Raggett

n.b. The above includes direct quotes from the TEI guidelines.
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