IFMES
IFMES stands for Interactive Fiction Metadata Element Set, and is a proposed standard by Ryukage a.k.a. Damian Dollahite.
(I find myself unable to understand what this is about exactly. A first casual skim of the material suggests that IFMES is some variant of XML that lets one declare game title, author, genre, and other metadata about an IF game in a standard manner that (hopefully) others will adopt inside applications or website services. TADS's Game Chest is similar in concept, but I assume that IFMES would potentially go further. I'd appreciate it if someone who does understand IFMES would explain it in layman's terms here, so non-techies can get a grasp on it. Thanks. -- David Welbourn 19:49, 10 Aug 2005 (Central Daylight Time))
It's a schema of interactive fiction data. Basically, the IFMES documents all (or most) of the "meta data" relating to any given interactive fiction game. By "meta data" I mean bits of information that have, over the years, become standard properties of a game. The obvious pieces of meta data are title and author. The not so obvious ones might be keyword or the baf properties. The use of the schema is sort of like a contract. If I design some system that uses game information, I can safe that I'm compliant with IFMES Version 1.0. If I'm the maintainer of the IF-Archive, I could say that I'm producing an XML database that is IFMES 1.0 compliant. If I'm creating a web service of Inform Extensions, I could say that the resulting information is provided in XML that conforms to the IFMES 1.0 schema. This makes it easier for anyone producing or consuming IF game information to do their work without having to design this portion of the process. --David Cornelson 17:19, 11 Aug 2005 (Central Daylight Time)
IFMES 1.0 was never published, it was an early working version that used a namespace specific to an application I'm working on; the first public spec was for IFMES 1.1, which uses the purl.org namespace (in retrospect this version numbering may not have been such a good idea). David Cornelson has already explained that IFMES provides standard names for all the most important bits of data used to describe an IF game, which is needed for different software to communicate with each other. What makes IFMES better than TADS Gameinfo or Zoom's metadata format is that it is not specific to one platform and it provides the structures necessary to express the metadata in RDF, which is a standard metadata language. RDF is not XML, but XML is typically used to encode the RDF data (much as HTML is used to encode text data). The significance of RDF is explained in Wikipedia's article on the Semantic Web. --Ryukage 19:15, 11 Aug 2005 (Central Daylight Time)
Links
- IFMES proposal (target (archive))
- Introducing IFMES - an IF metadata standard - Introductory discussion thread on raif.