This is a welcome discussion and worth reviving. To add to Henry's contribution, it's perhaps worth distinguising two types of document, HTML and other markup languages (e.g. CML). In HTML there is provision for generic metadata - 11 generic concepts - which cover 'most' needs of information management. By necessity they are dicipline-independent. I would be reluctant to add to these without careful thought, but just as the 7 original MIME types were not appropriate for molecular science there is a need for additional meta data containers. The question is whether we need to develop our own extensions or to use the current Dublin Core and choose a standard set of phrases that are machine-searchable. (If they aren't standard, they are probably of much less value). In CML the information is potentially very finely addressable. (I now have a scheme - shortly to be released - for addressing individual components of objects (e.g. atoms, spectral peaks) which means that a large amount of meta-information can be obtained by bruteforce machine searching of the document (e.g. does it contain a molecule?) On Fri, 20 Dec 1996, Rzepa, Henry wrote:

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Hello, does anybody know of contributions, reflections or recommendations from chemists or from a chemical point of view in the context of the metadata discussion which is connected with the keywords of "Dublin Core" or Warwick Framework". (For those who are interested see URL: http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core). I know of the CML project which in my opinion goes in this direction. Are there others ? Thank you [...] It is my intention to get a frozen version of CML out over this (in our country) holiday period. CML has the same syntactic provision for META as HTML, but it is up to the molecular community how that is used. I have also (recently) introduced an <ADMIN>...</ADMIN> element which was driven by the needs of hyperglossaries in CML but is relevant to any chemical document. This is a flexible container and so can contain people, e-mails, addresses, etc. It could, for example, contain a list of the molecules in a paper (e.g. as SMILES strings or CAS regnos). I'd welcome suggestions :-)

P. Peter Murray-Rust (PeterMR, ) Director, Virtual School of Molecular Sciences Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nottingham University, NG7 2RD, UK; Tel 44-115-9515100 Fax 5110 http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms/; OMF: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/omf/ ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)