Rick Barry wrote:

> Indexing is a hugely important type of metadata,...

Rick's message reply is an outstanding summary of several issues
related to indexing.

What I found of most interest is looking at author-supplied indexing,
publisher-compiled indexing, and user-generated indexing of digital
publications.

From the embedded indexing point of view, I lump the first two
together since the focus of standardizing embedded indexing is on the
standard side itself -- how to enable it. OpenReader need not focus on
who does the indexing. Ultimately, we simply want the spec not to get
in the way of how an actual index is embedded.

However, it is clear that indexing by end-users should not be embedded
within publications, but instead will be like annotations -- an index
item will point to within a publication. The reason is simple -- once
an author or publisher releases a publication, we have to assume that
the publication is "sealed" from any modification by those not
authorized to modify it.

This brings us into the other area of interest to me: standardization
of the annotation of OpenReader Publications and publications in other
similar XML-based frameworks (such as OEBPS). As I've written before,
annotation is a very broad term that includes what many think of
annotation (adding a note), bookmarking, highlighting, and yes, adding
an "index item". They are all similar -- maybe a term other than
"annotation" is needed to lump together all these different items.

Jon Noring