On Monday, February 18, 2002, at 03:00 AM, Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
Tom Bradford wrote:On Saturday, February 16, 2002, at 10:28 PM, Kimbro Staken wrote:Sorry, that isn't what I meant, I was asking about meta-data. What meta-data are we tracking about documents?At the moment, I think just creation time and last modified time.
This would be a good start, but I'm thinking of something more, like having a free-form metadata structure so that the metadata themselves are extensible. IMO there should be three metadata categories:
1. XML:DB metadata. This should be a joint effort with the XML:DB community, to come up with a common set of sensible metadata. There should also be an API to access them (maybe a service?). I tend to think that these metadata should include at least all the "filesystem like" metadata ("man stat") that make sense in an XML:DB database;
2. DB specific metadata. Any DB vendor might want to come up with a metadata set wich is peculiar to its implementation. As an example Xindice might come up with filer, versioning or linking informations;
3. User provided metadata. Any user should be allowed to store its application-specific metadata. This, IMHO, would be killer. And yes, Tom,
this would allow me to have a CMS up in minutes... :)
Does this really need to be part of the database? It seems like the flexibility required would lead to a more application specific solution.
This flexible metadata structure IMO asks for an XML metadata format. RDF/
DC seems to be the most obvious choice, but I'm afraid that it might be overkill. Also, while there should be an XML format for the metadata themselves, there should also be some kind of API to quickly access the data without XML programming.
Ugg, I can't stand RDF. :-)
Comments?
-- Gianugo Rabellino
Kimbro Staken XML Database Software, Consulting and Writing http://www.xmldatabases.org/
