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.
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