html metadata and dublin core for books

[salucci]

in a HTML page containing editorial data of a book, should be used
html meta tags, dublin core tags, or both? If last option, html tags
should refer to HTML page and DC tags to book, or what?
over the internet we find a big mess.

 

[Andy Dingley]

in a HTML page containing editorial data of a book, should be used
html meta tags, dublin core tags, or both?

Yes.

It's a mess, isn't it. I suggest keeping an eye on the developing
standards and being ready to change your publishing as needed. If you
embed high-quality metadata in a good standard now, you can always re-
process your pages in the future -- even if no-one else reads that
exact content in the meantime. It's not hard to stick full blown RDF /
OWL in there, just hard to find standards others can use.

It's also quite practical to duplicate content in several formats
within the same page. At least get it out there in vanilla HTML <meta>
as well, and I'd strongly suggest DC in <meta> too.

There's a recently updated recommendation on the W3C site about
embedding RDF in HTML. That's what I'd be using right now.

Old projects like OAI are still worth looking at.

 

[salucci]

It's also quite practical to duplicate content in several formats
within the same page. At least get it out there in vanilla HTML <meta>
as well, and I'd strongly suggest DC in <meta> too.

a trivial question:

if the author of the web page is Smith and the author of book
presented in the web page is James
what should be the content of the HTML <meta name="author" > and
dublin core <meta name="DC.Creator">?
it's a mess or not?

 

[Andy Dingley]

if the author of the web page is Smith and the author of book
presented in the web page is James
what should be the content of the HTML <meta name="author" > and
dublin core <meta name="DC.Creator">?

This is a common problem - you need to attach the metadata to some
notion of scope and that's hard with the crude HTML tools. For a web
page that's _about_ the book, then it's quite uncontroversially the
book's author. The real problem starts when a web page lists a
bibliography of half-a-dozen books. How do you identify just which one
you mean?