[Clipart] REPOST: openclipart packages and the idx file

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Okay, this is an old thread, but...

Mike Traum (whom I've Cced because I'm not sure whether he still reads
the list, as I haven't seen a post from him in a while) was asking a
while back about an XML index...

>  >> With regards to the keywords.idx file in the package, can you
>  >> start making that an xml file? It's a very perl centric file,
>  >> which make's it difficult for others (like myself) to write
>  >> tools that use your packages.

And in my reply the following things were said...

> I can see the value of having an XML index, but should it index just
> the keywords, or also authors, titles, and other metadata?  Also it
> should be named with an .xml suffix probably, something like index.xml
> or similar.  Anyone is welcome to write a tool that creates such an
> index, ...

> I might get to it myself, eventually (in which case I would probably
> just roll the functionality into the existing authority control
> script), 
  
This I have done.  The version of the clipart-authority-control script
in CVS has a new -x option, which creates an XML index of the
metadata.  I used this option for the 0.16 release, and so there is an
index.xml file included in the release.  The downside is that this is
another 3.9 MB uncompressed, although it compresses very well (222K in
the case of bzip2 compression), so it shouldn't add that much to the
total size of the releases.

What I want to discuss, though, is the upside:  now that we have this
thing, how can it be used?  What kinds of things can be done with it?
  
-- 
Open Clip Art Library:  Drawing Together
http://www.openclipart.org/