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[SPEC] Backwards-compatible metadata in Gemini

PJ vM pjvm742 at disroot.org

Wed Feb 24 19:16:11 GMT 2021

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On 24/02/2021 19:18, Oliver Simmons wrote:

Someone searching for freely-licenced (etc) documents is going to
have a hard time in that case, they would have to go through every
document manually to find the license.
Having it always at the end would be faster for people manually
reading, and would mean search engines/similar could just be asked to
filter out licenses they don't want (or do want).

I don't think it would be a realistic expectation that all or even amajority of authors will be including any given structured metadatafield in their pages. So when searching the whole Geminispace,restricting a search to results with a certain value for the "license"field will never be very effective. You have to either exclude orinclude results that have no license field at all. In the first case youdon't know what you're missing, while in the second case you get lots ofthings you don't want.

Also, some might put license information in a "license" field, whileothers might put it in "rights". The license may have multiple differentnames and abbreviations. These smaller problems could be combatted withmore conventions, but then metadata conventions would become ever morecomplicated.

Basically, I think a metadata convention is of rather limited use forthe purpose of searching, unless you know that the set of articles inwhich you're searching is actually using that convention, and in aconsistent way. And I think it would be hubris to expect most of theGeminispace to start using such a convention, let alone consistently.

-- pjvm