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6.1. Software required

6.1.1 Format


The format of the judgemental information that is to be made available to the public will constrain the uses to which it can be put. For this reason I suggest that the review information be stored as viewable web pages in HTML (or its successor XML), with any machine searchable fields be included (or duplicated) in the header section of the HTML using meta tags, for example: <META NAME="author-name" CONTENT="Edmonds, Bruce">. In this way many search engines can be easily adapted to index and search on the information (e.g. Harvest), as well as being browsed by the public and indexed by public search engines in the normal way.

The fields should conform to an accepted standard like ReDIF [14] and should include: standard information such as author, title, institutions, publication date, keywords and URL; information on the review board such as title, URL, classification codes, keywords, and e-mail of maintainer; and the judgemental information which could be anything the board desires, including average originality rating, number of reviewers, review date, average importance rating, standard of presentation, soundness and reviewer comments. Some of these, such as the title, can only be searched using key words and phrases but other data, such as level of presentation, are ordinal in nature and should be represented numerically so that the searcher can specify a minimum level (e.g. presentation > 2).

If there was a core of these fields that were agreed upon by a number of such boards this would ease the learning process by readers and enable secondary indexing and search engines to be developed.


A Proposal for the Establishment of Review Boards - Bruce Edmonds - 16 MAR 99
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