Metadata

Date: 2011/9/8

I'm looking for a simple way to include metadata in my documents. The
"Date: ..." line above is my motivating example: I need a way to
associate a date with content that's more reliable than the file
entry's last modified date (which can be perturbed by file
operations, like copy, not related to the file's content.

I'd like a wqy of representing metadata that's easy to read and write
and can be embdedded in plain text or HTML files, but is clear enough
to allow programmed parsing and close enough to established standards
to be recognizable to others.

The Dublin Core provides a standard set of metadata attributes, but
the various syntaxes that support it, like RDF, are very cumbersome
for maintenance by hand (though N3 and Turtle are almost simple
enough.

The source format for the FGDC Content Standard for Digital
Geospacial Metadata metadata compiler looks promising, but it
provides so little functionality beyond my simple "Date:" line it may
not be worth bothering with.