Meta Content Framework

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Meta Content Framework (MCF) is a specification of a content format for structuring metadata about web sites and other data.

Content format format used to store media (audio/video/subtitles/etc.) within a file or container format

A content format is an encoded format for converting a specific type of data to displayable information. Content formats are used in recording and transmission to prepare data for observation or interpretation. This includes both analog and digitized content. Content formats may be recorded and read by either natural or manufactured tools and mechanisms.

Metadata data about data

Metadata is "data information that provides information about other data". Many distinct types of metadata exist, among these descriptive metadata, structural metadata, administrative metadata, reference metadata and statistical metadata.

Data facts represented for handling

Data is a set of values of subjects with respect to qualitative or quantitative variables.

Contents

History

MCF was developed by Ramanathan V. Guha at Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group between 1995 and 1997. Rooted in knowledge-representation systems such as CycL, KRL, and KIF, it sought to describe objects, their attributes, and the relationships between them. [1]

Ramanathan V. Guha is the creator of widely used web standards such as RSS, RDF and Schema.org. He is also responsible for products such as Google Custom Search. He was a co-founder of Epinions and Alpiri. He currently works at Google as a Google Fellow.

Apple Advanced Technology Group

The Advanced Technology Group (ATG) was a corporate research laboratory at Apple Computer from 1986 to 1997. ATG was an evolution of Apple's Education Research Group (ERG) and was started by Larry Tesler in October 1986 to study long term research into future technologies that were beyond the time frame or organizational scope of any individual product group. Over the next decade, it was led by David Nagel, Richard LeFaivre, and Donald Norman. It was known as Apple Research Labs during Norman's tenure as VP of the organization. Steve Jobs closed the group when he returned to Apple in 1997.

Knowledge representation and reasoning is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can utilize to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Knowledge representation incorporates findings from psychology about how humans solve problems and represent knowledge in order to design formalisms that will make complex systems easier to design and build. Knowledge representation and reasoning also incorporates findings from logic to automate various kinds of reasoning, such as the application of rules or the relations of sets and subsets.

One application of MCF was HotSauce, also developed by Guha while at Apple. It generated a 3D visualization of a web site's table of contents, based on MCF descriptions. By late 1996, a few hundred sites were creating MCF files and Apple HotSauce allowed users to browse these MCF representations in 3D. [1]

HotSauce was experimental software developed by Apple Computer as a sample application of its Meta Content Framework. HotSauce generated a 3D visualization of the contents of an MCF file, for example a website sitemap. It could also be used to navigate the contents of the user's hard drive.

3D computer graphics graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data

3D computer graphics or three-dimensional computer graphics, are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images. Such images may be stored for viewing later or displayed in real-time.

When the research project was discontinued, Guha left Apple for Netscape, where, in collaboration with Tim Bray, he adapted MCF to use XML [2] [3] and created the first version of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). [4]

Tim Bray Canadian software developer

Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer and entrepreneur and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He has worked for Amazon Web Services since December 2014 and previously for Google, Sun Microsystems, the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and several start-ups.

XML Markup language developed by the W3C for encoding of data

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats. It is also used in knowledge management applications.

Related Research Articles

The Semantic Web is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standards promote common data formats and exchange protocols on the Web, most fundamentally the Resource Description Framework (RDF). According to the W3C, "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries". The Semantic Web is therefore regarded as an integrator across different content, information applications and systems.

RSS family of web feed formats

RSS is a type of web feed which allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator. The news aggregator will automatically check the RSS feed for new content, allowing the content to be automatically passed from website to website or from website to user. This passing of content is called web syndication. Websites usually use RSS feeds to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news headlines, or episodes of audio and video series. RSS is also used to distribute podcasts. An RSS document includes full or summarized text, and metadata, like publishing date and author's name.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for various domains: the nouns representing classes of objects and the verbs representing relations between the objects. Ontologies resemble class hierarchies in object-oriented programming but there are several critical differences. Class hierarchies are meant to represent structures used in source code that evolve fairly slowly whereas ontologies are meant to represent information on the Internet and are expected to be evolving almost constantly. Similarly, ontologies are typically far more flexible as they are meant to represent information on the Internet coming from all sorts of heterogeneous data sources. Class hierarchies on the other hand are meant to be fairly static and rely on far less diverse and more structured sources of data such as corporate databases.

Web syndication Broadcasting content from one website to other sites

Web syndication is a form of syndication in which content is made available from one website to other sites. Most commonly, websites are made available to provide either summaries or full renditions of a website's recently added content. The term may also describe other kinds of content licensing for reuse.

Atom (Web standard) Extensible Markup Language used for web feeds

The name Atom applies to a pair of related Web standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.

Web feed data format used for providing users with frequently updated content

On the World Wide Web, a web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe a channel to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by a news aggregator. A web feed is also sometimes referred to as a syndicated feed.

FOAF (ontology) Semantic Web ontology to describe relations between people

FOAF is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.

RDFa is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The RDF data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents. It also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.

The RSS-DEV Working Group was the outgrowth of a fork in RSS format development. The private, non-commercial working group began with a dozen members in three countries, and was chaired by Rael Dornfest, researcher and developer of the Meerkat RSS-reader software.

Web syndication technologies were preceded by metadata standards such as the Meta Content Framework (MCF) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), as well as by 'push' specifications such as Channel Definition Format (CDF). Early web syndication standards included Information and Content Exchange (ICE) and RSS. More recent specifications include Atom and GData.

DMOZ Open content directory of Web links established in 1998

DMOZ was a multilingual open-content directory of World Wide Web links. The site and community who maintained it were also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP). It was owned by AOL but constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification defines a set of XML metadata vocabularies for syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and multi-purposing content. PRISM provides a framework for the interchange and preservation of content and metadata, a collection of elements to describe that content, and a set of controlled vocabularies listing the values for those elements. PRISM can be XML, RDF/XML, or XMP and incorporates Dublin Core elements. PRISM can be thought of as a set of XML tags used to contain the metadata of articles and even tag article content.

XHTML+RDFa is an extended version of the XHTML markup language for supporting RDF through a collection of attributes and processing rules in the form of well-formed XML documents. XHTML+RDFa is one of the techniques used to develop Semantic Web content by embedding rich semantic markup. Version 1.1 of the language is a superset of XHTML 1.1, integrating the attributes according to RDFa Core 1.1. In other words, it is an RDFa support through XHTML Modularization.

References

  1. 1 2 Hammersley, Ben (2003). Content Syndication with RSS . Sebastopol: O'Reilly. p. 2. ISBN   978-0-596-00383-8.
  2. ↑ Guha, R V; Tim Bray (1997-06-06). Meta Content Framework Using XML. W3C. Retrieved 2014-09-14.
  3. ↑ Guha, R.V.; Bray, Tim (1997-06-13). "Meta Content Framework Using XML". Netscape. Archived from the original on June 15, 1997. Retrieved 2015-12-12.Cite uses deprecated parameter |deadurl= (help)
  4. ↑ Andreessen, Marc (1999-01-08). "Innovators of the Net: R.V. Guha and RDF". Netscape. Archived from the original on February 5, 2008. Retrieved 2014-09-14.Cite uses deprecated parameter |deadurl= (help)
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