(Have you seen Topic from Verity? It's a nice engine for doing
just this sort of thing... it's natural-language based.)
>In any event, I *really* would like to see explicit support for this sort
>of thing in HTML.
Why? It seems like a separate data format might work better for
your app. A client could get and display the HTML, but it could
also ask for the document in application/x-people-places-things form,
(be sure to check with Apple before using that name... :-)
which might look like:
(PERSONS (GATES WILLIAM)
(CLINTON WILLIAM)
)
(CORPORATIONS MICROSOFT)
(COUNTRIES USA)
>BTW, one of the things I might stick into META elements would be lists of
>all of the companies mentioned in an article, all of the people, all of the
>products, all of the fizzbins, etc. Getting that sort of information --
>the names of the META elements and the lists of items in them -- in
>response to the HEAD request would be of great benefit to navigation
>automation.
I can imagine a set of navigation mechanisms based on this sort
of information. I don't see that HTML is the most convenient
representation of the information, though.
If you've got a specific way to attack the resource discovery problem
with these semantic tags, I'd be very interested.
But if you just want a general mechanism to express machine-readable
semantic information, you're barking up a non-existent tree. From
what I've learned from the knowledge-representation researchers,
the best way to exchange arbitrary semantic information between
domains is to write it out in the natural language. Then the
domain-specific parser extracts the parts it's interested in.
Dan