[Zope] FYI: Portal Toolkit Slides and Demo available

[Paul Everitt]

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