I met recently with Jim Miller and Dan Connolly of the W3C, and Bill
Arms of CNRI to explore the possibility of piggybacking the PICS
technology and Warwick Framework-style metadata (including, of course,
Dublin Core). There seems to be a good chance that with modest changes
in the PICS spec, it would work quite well, and afford the benefit of a
widely deployed set of tools for creation and maintenance of metadata
on the Web. This strikes me as a big win.
There is no need or reason to abandon the embedding consensus we now
have, but the PICS encoding is slightly different and might well
eventually supplant the first, if it becomes as widespread as
expected. I don't see this as a problem, inasmuch as interconversion
will be trivial.
Eric Miller and Renatto Ianella are doing some quick and dirty
prototyping to explore problems, and we will be meeting again in mid
december with the W3C folks to pin down the changes. That spec will be
finalized for distribution in January, so its possible that we can
springboard further deployment of DC soon thereafter.
Comments welcome.
stu
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