# Re: URC's

Michael Mealling (ccoprmm@oit.gatech.edu)
Wed, 6 Apr 94 13:25:37 EDT

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    From: ccoprmm@oit.gatech.edu (Michael Mealling)

    Message-Id: <199404061725.AA04470@oit.gatech.edu>

    Subject: Re: URC's

    To: sollins@lcs.mit.edu (Karen R. Sollins)

    Date: Wed, 6 Apr 94 13:25:37 EDT

    In-Reply-To: <9404052341.AA26944@zippy.lcs.mit.edu>; from "Karen R. Sollins" at Apr 5, 94 7:41 pm

Karen R. Sollins said this:
> I don't know whether this will clear the air or only make it murkier,
> but let me try this.

It looks pretty good to me.

> First, about the "name". Originally, Michaal, I believe, proposed
> that the "C" was for "citation". I believe (correct me if I'm wrong)
> that that derived from the observation that this was supposed to be
> meta information about an object of the sort found in library
> citations. It made a lot of sense. I suggested later that we extend
> that concept by using "C" for "characteristic" because I was trying to
> generalize the concept. In my work, and therefore I can only assume
> in others as well, there will be use for meta-information that does
> not look like citation information, although some of it will. Hence
> the generalization. This part is really not a big deal.

It also came from the previous discussions concerning this where
everyone was calling it a citation. In order to continue in that
same vein without scaring everyone with a new acronym I kept it.
For a while there it seemed as though everyone was more concerned
with keeping the list of acronyms small than anything else.
Que sera sera....Uniform Resource Characteristics it is (until next
week....;-)

> 2) There is no one answer about their content. I have always viewed
> them as bags of attribute-value pairs (with the option of an attribute
> appearing more than once).

Same here. The basic reason behind this is that attribute-value pairs
are just about as universal a thing to parse as comma-delimited ascii.
While we may all like to espouse cross platform available files we
still export our spreadsheet documents to 1-2-3 (comma-delimited)
when we go from one to another. I still think any key to success lies
in the ability to be a common denominator that is VERY easy to build.

-MM

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