Re: Indexing of WWW space (going one higher than HTML)?

Marc VanHeyningen (mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu)
Tue, 02 Aug 1994 13:38:24 -0500


Thus wrote: Paul Wain
>2) There are 5 key bits of information about the document that we have
>identified, that are a requirement for some form of centralised searching or
>indexing:
>
> a)* Document title
> b) Keywords associated with the document
> c) Short Description of the Document
> d)* Document author
> e) Document owner
>
>The ones marked with a * should be displayed when the document is viewed, the
>ones that arent should at least be in the document somehow. Is this a valid us
>e
>of the META tags? Or are there other methods we could use. If we went outside
>HTML and accepted that we could convert back to HTML on the fly, (see question
>1) what other markup language could we use. (I say markup language because I
>think that say correctly annotated word processor files are NOT the way to go
>here).

This sounds reasonable to me. Document title is pretty obvious. The
document maintainer is often represented by <LINK REV=made
HREF=mailto:somebody> tags (the word "made" suggests "author" but the
use suggests "maintainer"... that probably should be fixed. IAFA/IIIR
distinguishes the two as "author" and "admin".)

Use of META tags like this is already happening; for instance, the
site-index script <http://www.ai.mit.edu/tools/site-index.html> or my
variant of it <http://www.cs.indiana.edu/item_index/intro.html>. It
seems reasonable.

>4) Finally, on searching the web space, have there been any advances in this
>recently? People here seem to be against the ALIWEB style approach to indexing
>.
>What other methods are people looking at?

What you describe above (making things like keywords and descriptions
of documents available) sounds very much like ALIWEB. Can you be more
specific about what they seem to be against? Use of document-specific
data like keywords? Expectation of sites to locally construct an
index which is polled? Lack of hierarchy? Lack of support for
multiple keyword searches?

I've talked to people who dislike using it, and the reasons usually
boil down to "The link to the UK is slow." :-)

- Marc

--
<A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/mvanheyn.html">Marc VanHeyningen</A>