June 2, 1996
Attendees (alphabetically): | |||
Nick Arnett | narnett@verity.com | Mic Bowman | bowman@transarc.com |
Eliot Christian | echristi@usgs.gov | Dan Connolly | conolly@w3.org |
Martijn Koster | m.koster@webcrawler.com | John Kunze | jak@ckm.ucsf.edu |
Carl Lagoze | lagoze@cs.cornell.edu | Michael Mauldin | fuzzy@lycos.com |
Christian Mogensen | christian@vivid.com | Wick Nichols | wickn@microsoft.com |
Timothy Niesen | tmn@swl.msd.ray.com | Stuart Weibel | weibel@oclc.org |
Andrew Wood | woody@dstc.edu.au |
Given that it is judged undesireable for such embedded metadata to display on browser screens, any solution requires encoding information in attribute tags rather than as container element content.
The goal was to agree on a simple convention for encoding structured metadata information of a variety of types (which may or may not be registered with a central registry analogous to the Mime Type registry). It was judged that a registry may be a necessary feature of the metadata infrastructure as alternative schema are elaborated, but that deployment in the short-term could go forward without such a registry, especially in light of the proposed use of the LINK tag to link descriptions to a standard schema description as described below.
The convention agreed upon is as follows:
< META NAME = "schema_identifier.element_name" CONTENT = "string data" >Thus, a partial Dublin Core citation might be encoded as follows:
< META NAME = "DC.title" CONTENT = "HTML 2.0 Specification" > < META NAME = "DC.author" CONTENT = "Tim Berners-Lee" > < META NAME = "DC.author" CONTENT = "Dan Connolly" > < META NAME = "DC.date" CONTENT = "November, 1995" > < META NAME = "DC.identifier" CONTENT = "ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1866.txt" >And a collection of Microsoft Word metadata might be encoded as follows:
< META NAME = "MSW.title" CONTENT = "W3C Indexing Work Shop Report" > < META NAME = "MSW.author" CONTENT = "Wick Nichols" > < META NAME = "MSW.date" CONTENT = "May 30, 1996" >
< LINK REL = SCHEMA.schema_identifier HREF="URL" >Thus, the reference description of one metadata scheme, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, would be referenced in the LINK HREF as follows:
< LINK REL = SCHEMA.dc HREF = "http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core" >The description of an element could be accessed by the construction of URL using the # token to identify a named anchor. Thus, the derived URL below actually links to the title element in the reference description of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set.
http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core#titleThis URL would correspond to the human-readable description of the title element within the document by a NAME anchor such as:
<A NAME = "title"> Title </A> The name of the work provided by the author or publisher.While use of the LINK tag is not required for a given schema, when used, it will make possible retrieval of the reference definition of a given schema element, and will therefore reduce the need for a formal metadata scheme registry. Multiple LINK tags can be used so that elements derived from multiple schemas can be referenced within a single document.