Rich:
I've had some success encouraging the insertion of META tags in pages on
campus using Andy Powell's DC-dot tool
(http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/) In most cases this can be
accomplished using the lowest common denominator (e.g., student labor) with
some assistance. I generally try to do a few samples, and encourage some
simple edits in case of odd results (generally resulting from weird HTML).
There doesn't seem to be a problem with the co-existence of generic META
tags and DC, but your mileage may vary there.
I suspect you'll want to index some of the DC elements together: creator,
contributor and publisher (for instance), and perhaps title and
description, etc. In general, I suspect that DC-dot will pick up the
"generic" author info and slap it into DC, so you should be safe just
indexing the DC. But you can check that out as you proceed.
I'm sure others will have additional suggestions, so I'll stop here.
Diane Hillmann
Editor, "Using Dublin Core"
At 09:36 PM 1/22/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>Please forgive me if any of the following is an FAQ. I followed
>Dublin Core fairly closely until 1997 or so. I've done some
>poking around among the list of Projects at Purl.org but
>may have missed something on point.
>
>At Michigan State University we run AltaVista, starting back
>in 1996. We have recently migrated to the AltaVista 3.0 product,
>and noticed a feature that lets the site define its own META
>tags for indexing. See:
>
>http://search.msu.edu:9000/adminhelp/help/metatagindexing.html
>
>This could be really powerful.
>
>I am interested in using this facility to encourage metadata
>at least on home pages if not entire sites on campus. I seek
>advice of the Dublin Core-noscenti.
>
>First, is anyone doing this?
>
>Second, how should DC tags co-exist with common, ad-hoc META tags?
>
>We have added the core elements to the AltaVistsa config file.
>Now I am wondering how to handle other commonly used, but
>non-standards-based, META tags. One option is to map
>common tags to DC ones. From the A/V doc:
>
>Note: Multiple META tag names can map to the same field name, for example:
>
>author author
>creator author
>DC.creator author
>
>As I read the doc, users would have to search on the "author" field
>(as opposed to DC.creator), which would not be good for Dublin-Core-savvy
>users. However I contend the number of those is vanishingly small on
>our big campus.
>
>The advantage would be that for those pages on campus that DO have
>the DC.creator field, or the author field, or the creator field,
>a search for author:"Jon Havlicek" would match.
>
>I also expect that we might offer a specialized fielded search
>interface with common terms for labels instead of DC names.
>
>We could define separate fields for each, and offer via
>that fielded search interface a way to search all forms
>at once. That way the DC tags and the common tags have
>their own index "buckets" in case that was ever useful.
>
>Which way would you go?
>
>Third, how do we get page authors to populate pages with DC metadata?
>
>It has always seemed to me that metadata would go nowhere until major
>authoring tools at least allow standard metadata tags -- if not
>demanding it.
>
>It doesn't appear to me that the situation has changed any. Is there
>a SINGLE major Web authoring tool that out of the box encourages
>users to enter DC metadata?
>
>Absent that, has anyone succeeded in making templates for FrontPage,
>DreamWeaver, and the like, that could be adopted by users interested
>seriously in doing metadata well?
>
>We do have a major humanities research project that is looking at
>automatically poking DC tags into at least their top-level pages.
>I am rather pessimistic about getting anyone else to do it, and
>would love to hear encouraging real-world examples.
>
>Fourth, a question not necessarily related to Dublin Core. We are
>exploring how to mark pages that are "official" in the search
>index, allowing filtered searches on official status, and/or
>heightened ranking and/or a hit list icon. Has anyone tackled
>that? How?
>
>/rich
>
>PS -- the list of search engines in the DC FAQ should now include
>AltaVista.
>
>--- end forwarded text
>
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Diane I. Hillmann
Metadata Specialist
National Science Digital Library Project at Cornell
Department of Computer Science Voice: 607/255-5691
419 Rhodes Hall Fax: 607/255-4428
Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: [log in to unmask]
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