Alex is having some problems posting to the list at the moment, so he
asked me to forward on a few comments. Here they are:


>we did some experiments with METS the last month. The results might be
>of interest for you.
>
>First of all we tried to use METS to encode metadata of books and
>journals. I send you an example of a book with this email. As it is hard
>to encode all layout features just in METS we use your own schema to
>encode text and layout of pages. Physical and logical structure then
>simply map to this file. The physical structure also maps text, layout
>pages to image files. The example is a bit simplified but it shows
>pretty good how we intent to use METS with METAe. (Please have a look at
>the amdSecs as the solution with 2 IDs is rather strange but necessary)
>
>Second. Pisa is still working hard on their SGML/XML search engine
>(tresy) and is extending the functionality so they can follow links und
>idrefs in XML documents. (By the way, using xlink in METS would simplify
>that task). Based on this an application called "tresy site" is
>developed that will allow to search and display a set of METS objects.
>
>Third. We did some prototyping for a repository that stores METS objects
>generated by the METAe Engine. We tried METS XML files, METS in an XML
>database and found the performance very poor. We decided to use a sql
>database instead and developed an table structure that reflects the
>features of the METS objects. METS XML files are only used for
>transferring data to and from the database. Because just mapping METS
>objects to the database and generating XML files out of the database
>again does not solve the problem of performance (the XML parser is the
>problem) we built a layer of java objects between the database and the
>XML files. These objects act as proxies that allow fast access to parts
>of METS objects even if the objects become very large.
>
>regards,
>
>Alexander
>
>----
>Alexander Egger
>
>project.service.bureau
>University of Innsbruck
>Innrain 52 / A-6020 Innsbruck / Austria
>E-mail: [log in to unmask]
>Phone: +43 512 507 9055
>Fax: +43 512 507 2607
>
>http://meta-e.uibk.ac.at/
>http://www.literature.at/
>
>