On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Roy Tennant wrote:
> I've cobbled together a quick draft of Resource Types. Terry Kuny's model
> and the Jon Knight/Martin Hamilton draft served as the main models, but as
> you will see I took a lot of liberties.
Looks good to me.
> I think we also need to keep in mind what the purpose(s) of this element
> are. If no one is going to parse down to the nth level, then we shouldn't
> spend time specifying it. What will we actually *use*?
I think if we initially aim to restrict n to be 1 <= n <= 3 we'll not have
too much of a problem. And if, as you suggest, people can choose how deep
they go when generating or using the value, then I don't think we're going
to overcomplicate things for the users. I forsee the most common usage of
this element as being web search engines providing drop down lists of
resource types to allow people to "home" in on the sort of resource they
want. If I'm looking for the man page for the UNIX sort utility, limiting
the search down to resources of type DOCUMENT.Monograph.Manual will
increase the likelihood of having highly relevant resources returned, even
if I do the Mr Joe Normal thing of sticking in just a single keyword of
"sort".
> There's also the issue of extensibility. Do we need to identify every last
> possibility (I hope not) or can we devise a scheme that will allow some
> local variation with a flag so that it could be ignored if the record is
> processed by a system that is unfamiliar with the type.
How about a name starting with "x-" at any point in the naming heirarchy
denotes a local extension that mainstream services may choose to not go
any further into. Ie if a resource had some metadata with the resource
type set to DOCUMENT.Story.x-children.x-horror then most service would
just note it down as being in the DOCUMENT class and story subclass, but
would ignore the local extensions.
Tatty bye,
Jim'll
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl. More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
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