[Sigia-l] Link to content or metadata

[:murb: [maarten brouwers]]

Hi,

Non-detailed question:
What is a better approach for referring to data: referring to it's 
metadata (having a reference to the data it's about) or to the content 
(which refers to it's metadata)?

Bit vague? Maybe the detailed question clarifies some...

Detailed question:
I am in a little struggle at the moment. I've created a small 'cms' 
which uses XHTML files as storage for (hyper) text. These XHTML files 
contain a link[1] to a rdf file containing metadata about[2] this document.

The hierarchy of the current site is created using an XML file linking 
to the XHTML files. Through some parsing I present the information 
containing both the content as well as some metadata (such as 'author' 
and 'summary').

Now I was wondering is it a good thing linking to XHTML (I consider this 
as 'content')? Maybe linking to the RDF (=metadata) from the document 
presenting the site structure is a better choice? Advantages:

* a 'related pages' option can certanly be build more easier when there 
is an complete list of files containing metadata.
* I could be adding a different format for information storage and 
having the metadata telling what the format is is would make things 
probably easier.

When I started however, linking to the XHTML files sounded more logical, 
as content seemed more important. Through above reasoning I tend to 
conclude that linking to metadata is a more future/feature proof option, 
but I still would appreciate some feedback on my reasoning. Further 
reading on this type of matter is also welcome.

Thanks in forward for your insights,

g.,



Maarten Brouwers

[1] text.html links to metadata: <link rel="meta" 
type="application/rdf+xml" href="meta.rdf" />
[2] meta.rdf links to content: <rdf:Description rdf:about="text.html">