Re: doc metadata - practical uses for it ?

[Helen OBoyle <hoboyle -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hi,

This is not quite one of your use cases, but whatever format it's in,
metadata is metadata, so....

We're a hybrid DocBook / Confluence shop.  We use DocBook both to "write
books" and simply to create reference pages for APIs and data structures,
which are then used in various ways.  We put metadata into DocBook files to
control how our homegrown publishing system transforms and publishes each
page of docs -- listing applicable releases for the page, publishing
formats (full detail, summary only, make cross-document links live or not,
etc.), publishing locations (draft review space, release space, personal
space, etc.).  We also use it to control how a dev process picks up content
from our files to embed in field-by-field help, and to keep track of the
Perforce version of the product/database table schema from which the latest
content file was generated. Using it for SEO is on the radar but we haven't
gotten there yet.

I think metadata really comes into its own when you automate things -
either on the content acquisition side or on the downstream re-use side.

Kind regards,

Helen.

On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 4:05 AM, Monique Semp <monique -dot- semp -at- earthlink -dot- net>
wrote:

> Hello, WR-L-ers,
>
> Iâm working on a presentation that includes a discussion about metadata. I
> started explaining how to create metadata in different tools, but then it
> hit me that Iâve never actually used any of the metadata that Iâve added
> into docs, and never seen anyone extract metadata for any use...
>
> So, can anyone cite any real-world (or at least recognizably practical,
> do-able, and useful) examples of making use of metadata?
>
>
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