Kenneth Holmund writes:
> PICS is heavily advertized nowadays and many aspects of PICS are
> indeed quite nice. Are there any attempts to set up scalable
> search/navigation systems that deploys PICS?
> Most things I find about PICS deals with "filtering" which
> definately isn't what we are interested in.
> What ideas do the PICS people have about search/navigation
> protocols/methods, i.e. how does PICS fit into the harvesting,
> cataloguing and indexing picture (e.g. Yahoo/SBIG, NWI/EWI/AltaVista)?
The original PICS specification is tailored for rating systems. It is
of minimal significance to the metadata community in its present form.
The changes in the specification now under review (PICS-ng) will
establish for the Web all of the characteristics described in the
Warwick Framework document (www.dlib.org/dlib/july96/lagoze/07/lagoze.html).
When the new specification is stable it will be possible to do serious
pilot projects with it, but not until that time. Meanwhile, we have a
reasonable convention for embedding metadata in HTML.
It is important to note that PICS offers nothing in particular to
improve navigation or searching per se. The benefit of PICS as a
metadata carrier syntax is that, as a widely available transport
syntax, it will promote the collection and interchange of formally
described metadata of various types (not just DC).
The aggregation of significant chunks of such metadata in a Warwick
Framework architecture, exchanged in a widely supported transfer
syntax, will proviide a substrate for structured searching. It will
still be up to search service providers (libraries, corporations, web
indexing services) to provide sensible search systems to take
advantage of the metadata.
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