[Bug-gnupedia]Data Model

[Bob Dodd]

It strikes me that one of the first things we need is some way to wrap
encyclopedia entries to give cataolgers some chance in the future.

Thinking of what I would need to help catalog the information, I'd want
to get at: title, abstract (if it's a long entry), authors/main
authors, citations, references to external peer reviews, keywords,
synonyms, target audience/assumed knowledge, publication date, source
journal if this material has been published before, copyright text. Oh,
and the content itself, mustn't forget that...

Since the approach seems to be web-based, it would seem to make sense
for our HTML to in fact be XML (or at least to be wrapped in XML), and
to use XML DTD entries to describe the fields we need.

Not that I would expect any "normal" contributer to know XML, but
perhaps we could offer a simple tool to enter the information (e.g. a
small Web page hosted at GNU?) that would generate the XML wrapper for
the contributer. We could go as far as to use that wrapper tool as part
of a "submissions" page rather than submitting by e-mail.

Such a tool is needed relatively soon if we want to capture this sort
of information a standardised way; the more entries that are sent
ad-hoc, the more difficult it will be to go back and fix this later. I
know cataloging is much further down the line, but we need to get the
information format, and the content itself, standardised from the
beginning, or our catalogs will be no better than the current web
search engines.

Bob Dodd.






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