Weibel,Stu felt an urge to reveal at 3:24 AM -0500 on 1997-09-30:
> Mary's Coverage workgroup paper adopts a strongly cartesian or
> foot-print view of coverage.
>
> I can also imagine it being used in an unqualified free-text mode...
> coverage = Columbus, Ohio
>
> very loose semantics, indeed. Useful? Probably less so than a more
> strongly-typed version. Eric mentioned to me that some substantial
> percentage (40%?) of all web searches are for local resources.
> <red-neck-accent>Don't need no bounding box to find a list of all the
> Holiday Inns in Columbus.</red-neck-accent>
I'm not sure what you mean by "strongly-typed" version, but I think *very*
few people doing any kind of search will type in the exact geographic
location (longitude, latitude, and minutes) of that place--just the name.
I think it would be better to set up a clear syntax of location based on
geographic names. I swear we had this thread earlier, and I said something
along the lines of "We should have a sort of hierarchal system"--preferably
top-down.
For example, you might put "US-VA-Charlottesville-Downtown Mall". This
would indicate that the general coverage is the US, then more specifically
the state of Virginia, then the city of Charlottesville, then the area
known as the Downtown Mall. This would be perfect for a page describing
attractions/shops on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, VA US. I think
that using standardized postal abbreviations for upper-hierarchal locations
makes the most sense--in my example, Virginia should only be indicated by
VA, not Va or other variants.
However, the last item *shouldn't* be abbreviated. For example, if I
specified simply a document covering Virginia, then it should be
"US-Virginia". Why the change? Think of how the usual search terms would
be used. If you're looking for something in a town, you might type the
name of the town and the abbreviation of the state, ie: "Richmond VA". But
if you're doing a search for something in the state of Virignia, you'd
probably type "Virginia" in full. The same applies if the coverage is for
the entire US--people might type in US, but they're much more likely to
type in "United States".
The geographic coverage could then have many levels of granularity, similar
to the ISO DATE's granularity. While writing out records as "Town, Region,
Country" may be more familliar, since metadata is not specifically for
humans to look at but instead for record keeping, it doesn't really matter.
Some other options: Use a zip-code schema (this would work for US--I don't
know how many countries use zip codes though, or similar things). Also,
apparently there's this global positioning systems standard, although that
seems a little to specific.
The name of countries and cities should correspond to the language of the
document. For example, a document in Italian should use "Roma", while a
document in English should use "Rome". This way, the documents found will
most likely correspond to the user's language preferences as well.
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[ Jordan Reiter ]
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[ "Don't you realize that intellectual people ]
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