Chris Blackall wrote:

This is very timely development for me and I can't wait to access it. Congratulations to the Zope team. About, http://www.zope.org/Products/PortalToolkit/Tour/Images/demo5.gif The advanced search in the demo allows for a focused search of Zope catalogue items, great, but could the metadata schema or search categories be extended to include Dublin Core(DC) Metadata standard?

Yes, we looked at the DC specs last month as part of the portal push. Though I expect we'll support Dublin Core, either way it is awfully easy to extend or change the common cataloging metadata. Property sheets make this really, really easy.

see http://purl.oclc.org/dc/ Although there are 13 elements in the DC standard, technically none are required, however using DC tags enables more accurate distributed searches and the possibility of an external (to the Zope DB) metadata repository that would have a namespace that conformed to a *standard* and was indexable by external webbots, agents etc. or addressable by a distributed search protocol such as Z39.50. see http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ I believe the incorporation of search facilities BETWEEN Zope portals (in future versions) would add a great deal of value to the proposed portal system. Just don't ask me to build one!!

Another reason to want DC is that it is one of the core RDF vocabularies, at least as far as Mozilla (and I presume Open Directory) is concerned. Thus, if we go with DC, the Z Catalog should be able to feed the RDF widget in Mozilla, giving a hierarchical view of the Zope site. Anybody out there have any experience with Mozilla and RDF? --Paul