Standardized documentation metadata

Pete Travis me at petetravis.com
Thu Mar 26 05:28:15 UTC 2015


Hi all,

I'm working through the logistics of consuming arbitrary markup
formats.  It would be helpful to have a standardized way to describe a
document.  The example below is YAML, because it is easy to digest,
write, and read, and I think the structure covers the important
attributes without being cumbersome.

---
title: Example Document
stub: A representation of a document description standard.
abstract: >
    This could be an example document.
    It could explain example documents.
    It could use examples to explain what a document is.
    It is none of these.
author:
- Carlton Bentleby
- Vizek Glibensky
- Obvious Pseudonym
taxonomy:
    theme: Contributions
    scope: Documentation
    track: Metadata
    project: anerist
tags:
- yaml
- metadata
- proposal
- standard
---

title, stub, and abstract are self-apparent. 

Author seems like a MAY item;  for a standard to go further than our
group, it'll need that, but staking a line around a collaborative work
MAY discourage collaboration.

The taxonomy can be in any order, but in function it's hierarchical;
theme at a very abstract level, scope being more refined, track gets
down to a specific topic.  The project differentiates between different
approaches to addressing a given topic (and hey, people _will_ look for
answers on a specific solution).

Tags give some SEO value, could help crossreferences, site search
features... all that stuff that tags do.

What do you think?  How can it be better?

-- 
-- Pete Travis
 - Fedora Docs Project Leader
 - 'randomuser' on freenode
 - immanetize at fedoraproject.org




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