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NOTICE: This version of the NSF Unidata web site (archive.unidata.ucar.edu) is no longer being updated.
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----- Original Message ----- Sent: Friday, June 14, 2002 10:13 AM > In the spirit of wouldn't-it-be-nice, I'll put out a request for a better idea. > I think we are missing the boat a bit with respect to the metadata tag, but I am > not sure of the solution. Consider GCMD, for example. You have included DIF > as one of the metadata types, but from a client point-of-view, that is much less > than what can be done. > > Consider for example, HELLERMAN, which is a GCMDID. With that id, I can ask > the GCMD for many versions of the metadata, including I suppose the DIF document > itsself (though offhand I do not know how to construct the URL to get the DIF). > > Sample url (html): > http://gcmd.nasa.gov/servlets/md/getdif.py?entry_id=HELLERMAN&xsl=full_displ ay.xsl&portal=gcmd > > Obviously if I am writing an HTML client, the html version would be nice. If I > am editing DIFs, I probably want the DIF version, etc. > > So are these different metadata? Or are they metadata-services on the same > metadata, i.e. I can get it translated by various servers? > > Benno > Currently there is a documentation element and a metadata element: "A documentation element contains or refers to content that should be displayed to an end-user when making selections from the catalog. The content may be HTML or plain text. We call this kind of content "human readable" information." "A metadata element contains or refers to structured information about datasets, which is used by client programs to properly display or search for the dataset. Typically, metadata is not displayed to an end-user when making selections from the catalog, although it may be useful to make it optionally available. We call this kind of content "machine readable" information." For GCMD, I would expect us to add some GCMD-specific code in our client libraries to take maximal advantage of the GCMD DIF metadata, but its not obvious that there are lots of different variation of the DIF metadata for a given dataset. For documentation elements that are displayed to humans, I would expect the catalog builder to select what they think are the best links that will be useful to humans browsing the catalog, and use the link title to indicate the type.
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