On Wed, 9 Apr 1997, Jon Knight wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Apr 1997 [log in to unmask] wrote:
> > a. There is some feeling that Coverage should be used only for what might be
> > termed non-fiction works.
>
> I think that's something that the creator of the metadata should be left
> to decide; if someone wants to let people know that their fictional story
> takes place in Islington in 1876 then they should be able to.
>
Ask a librarian at any public library. There are lots of people that
want to read fiction with stories taking place at certain intervals in
time-space. In Finland people are putting together a thesaurus for the
description fictional prose...
> > b. There is a viewpoint that Coverage is a type of Subject or
> Keyword and should be subsumed under that element.
>
...
> To me coverage.polygon seems to already provide the functionality of
> coverage.x.min, coverage.x.max, coverage.y.min, coverage.y.max, etc, in
> that it specifies a region. Indeed a polygon could generalise a region
> to allow a 3d or 4d volume to be defined with something like:
Hangon, Jon. Don't forget about gravitation and the theory of general
relativity. There is a fifth dimension! You should be able to give
proper metadata on the restaurant at the end of the universe,
shouldn't you ?-)
To be serious: The bounding box approach is supported by (for
instance) the GILS profile in Z39.50, and can be implemented in search
engines today. A WWW based metadata creator can fairly easily be
constructed that supports it, so it would be possible to do
information retrieve on gothic novels with the story set in Islington.
So I strongly supports the idea from Canberra with coverage.x.min,
coverage.x.max, coverage.y.min, coverage.y.max. It is indeed a problem
anyway to do this on an arbitrary map projection anyway. (Any other
projection than Mercator's),
>
> <meta name="DC.Coverage.polygon" content="[ 0.0 -0.2 0.15,
> 0.9 0.0 0.15,
> 0.0 0.0 0.15,
> 0.0 -0.2 -0.15,
> 0.9 0.0 -0.15,
> 0.0 0.0 -0.15,
> 0.0 0.0 -0.15 ]">
>
> (nicking the coordinate syntax un-ashamedly from OpenInventor/VRML)
That must be the second floor on the local pub in Islington.
Sigfrid
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