Treatment (Was Re: Debian Doc Project and LDP)

[C Polisher <cpolish@ns.net>]

Adam,

You've done a nice job with the metadata docs! 
Here's a piece that might fit somewhere. 

When informational items are classified by 
_treatment_, searchers can quickly locate 
desired information. Treatment would be an 
element explaining the type of coverage 
that the material provides, picked from a
list. 

Such as: Manpage, Howto, Guide, Newsgroup, 
RFC, FAQ, Tip, Intro, Survey, Package, RPM, 
Periodical, Thesis, Catalog, Mailinglist, 
Book, Techreport, Algorithm, Article, Tutorial, 
Patent, Videotape, Handbook, Glossary, Event...

This is especially helpful when there's
a great deal of information to sort through.
Example: Jenny User searches for info on TCP/IP.
The LDP search yields 210 hits. Treatment could
narrow down the field of info:

  If they want to know what the initials stand for, 
  there's the [Glossary] treatment. Example: Jargon File,
  http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/TCPIP.html.

  If they want to solve a congestion issue with
  TCP/IP, then a [Package] treatment might be helpful. E.g.,
  "A TCP Vegas Implementation for Linux"
  http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/cardwell/linux-vegas/

  They might be having a technical problem and want 
  to discuss it with others. Possibly a [Newsgroup] treatment 
  is what they're looking for, such as: 
  news:comp.protocols.tcp-ip or
  news:comp.os.linux.networking

  An [FAQ] treatment might be the best information source: 
  http://www.itprc.com/tcpipfaq/default.htm

  Thesis work posted to the WWW or available on FTP is
  sometimes useful; perhaps Ansari's [Thesis] on Adapting TCP/IP to ATM,
  http://hegel.ittc.ukans.edu/projects/tcpip_atm/thesis.ps
  
  The Networking overview [Howto] might contain everything
  they need to know: 
  http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Networking-Overview-HOWTO.html

  and so on ...

The "core" information of the LDP (or the DDP) could be 
surveyed and classified for "treatment" without
expending too much effort. For instance, the HOWTO's
might all be processed (tagged?) from a script. 
Incorporating (classifying, indexing) material outside
the scope of the LDP is a _big_ undertaking. ;^)


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