It happens quite a bit. Much of the value of HTML is its ability to
capture and represent knowledge in an informal or semi-formal way.
But folks often run into the boundaries of its expressive capability,
and look for ways out.
The META tag is intended for experiments on the edge of HTML's
expressive capability. I haven't seen "the answer" to this problem
that I'd like to standardize.
The point of my message is to encourage those of you who are seriously
interested in this topic to become familiar with the existing work in
the field: both the traditional library science cataloging (sp?)
stuff, and the more wigged-out AI knowledge representation stuff.
Reading the background literature will show just how interesting
and complex this problem is. Hmm... maybe that's not 100% a good
thing: the web was largely built by folks who didn't know enough
realize that it couldn't be done :-)
At W3C, our notes on the subject area are kept at:
"Collaboration, Knowledge Representation and Automatability"
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Collaboration/
Last updated 07 Nov 1995
This stuff is also intimately related to naming and addressing,
which see:
WWW Names and Addresses, URIs, URLs, URNs, URCs
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Addressing/
$Id: Overview.html,v 1.2 1995/07/28 22:23:04 connolly Exp $
In particlar, I'd like to point out the work by Daniel LaLiberte at
NCSA, Stu Weibel at OCLC, and others:
http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu:80/HyperNews/get/www/URCs.html
I keep some notes on a related theme, "Resource Discovery and Reliable
Links" at:
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/People/Connolly/drafts/citations.html
In particular, please check out Harvest:
http://rd.cs.colorado.edu/harvest/
and the ARPA knowledge sharing initiative:
ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort public library
http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/
Fri Oct 7 17:30:19 1994
and the work by Martin Roscheisen Christian Mogensen at stanford
on BRIOS:
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/ANNOT_DOC/
Dan