>The <taxonomy> element has two slightly different, but related, functions.
>For well-recognized and documented public classification schemes, such as
>Dewey or other published descriptive thesauri, it contains simply a
>bibliographic citation indicating where a full description of a particular
>taxonomy may be found. For less easily accessible schemes, the <taxonomy>
>element contains a description of the taxonomy itself as well as an optional
>bibliographic citation.
This could have interesting spin-off benefits. If taxonomies' descriptions
were to become accessible via a standard mechanism, that would help solve
some of the nasty problem of needing a priori knowledge of the contents of
a information source for searching. There's also some interesting research
into the merging of partially overlapping taxonomies to map sources to one
another and to create richer, er, meta-taxonomies. There's some hope that
this is a means to begin to automate the generation of semantic networks.
Nick
Multimedia Computing Corp.
Campbell, California
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"We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunity." -- Pogo