So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text -- a newspaper story -- that has no chance of being repurposed. Let me clarify. I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on a cell phone." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story in RSS." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on my PDA." Those are fine goals, but they're examples of changing the format, not the information itself. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically -- and in machine-readable format.
..."recent work recognizes the importance of context relations,
metadata, annotations for the pedagogical value of a digital library.
This new architecture uses Fedora, a tool for representing complex content,
data, metadata, web-based services, and semantic relationships, as the basis of
an information network overlay (INO)."