Those of you who have been at it for weeks, please excuse a chemist
entering at a late stage. I was rather hoping the Hypermailed archived
might have some metadata elements to help me search for the
information I seek! But having only the subject lines to help me,
please forgive me if this information has already been addressed in
a previous query (the arcane art of putting metadata into subject lines
is one few of us have mastered).
My problem is that a lot of chemical syntax and content is contained
not as ASCII keywords in the body of e.g. an HTML (or
other SGML dtd) but via the HREFs to what we call
chemical MIME documents. A typical example might be
<A HREF="http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/atp.pdb">Brookhaven protein format</a>
[we DO have a strict SGML dtd called CML or chemical markup language where
metadata COULD be directly inserted, but that is another story]
The server will complete the namespace authenticity by returning the MIME
header chemical/x-pdb. But of course the document itself does not
carry this value.
A robot inspecting the header of the HTML document carrying this link
would almost certainly wish to index the fact that the document contains
a rich chemical vein in this .pdb file which has the IMT chemical/x-pdb
What I imagine this robot would need therefore is metadata of the following
type
<META NAME = "DC.RELATION" TYPE = "CHILD" CONTENT =
"http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/atp.pdb">
My problem is, can I link the metadata element "DC.FORM"
CONTENT="chemical/x-pdb" to the "DC.RELATION" TYPE = "CHILD"
element? Given that the very use of TYPE modifiers is still under
active discussion, am I hoping for far to much to be achieved under the
constraints of HTML 2.0?
Put simply, I want metadata in a chemically oriented HTML document
to state that it contains a link to a document with precise chemically
parsable syntax. I might mention that many of the chemical IMT formats
in use could NOT be adapted to have metadata elements inserted directly into
their content, and that some sort of LINK would be needed to make this
association
Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY;
[log in to unmask]; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804.
URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ (Eudora Pro 3.0)
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