Michael H. Barker writes,
WRT to metadata, although "WWW Links for Chemists" has metadata in it's .html, we take little notice of the .html code/content of documents we index. Until someone comes up with a chemistry specific *spidering* search engine, i.e. a chemistry specific version of AltaVista, the metadata isn't going to be used effectively.
I agree entirely that the community itself will have to solve this problem, although it should make good use of generic technologies developed by people who know what they are doing. This is why initiatives such as the Dublin Core, Dublin Chem, XML and RDF are so important to us, but its us who will have to implement it for chemists. For what its worth, two years ago, I inserted a tiny little document into the root directory of our server called chembot.txt (after the control file that most generic search engines are supposed to inspect prior to indexing your site). If every chemistry related site were to adopt such a convention as a global chemical standard, then the creation of a "chemistry specific version of AltaVista" would be quite trivial! chembot.txt, at its simplest, represents a single byte of information; if its present, the site will have chemical content, if its not, it probably will not. Chembot.txt was patterned after the MIME content of the site. Arguably, nowadays it should also include more explicit meta-data search terms Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)