11. Related standards and practices
The tools are coming together, if slowly, to edit and format
DocBook markup. But DocBook itself is a means, not an end. We'll need
other standards besides DocBook itself to accomplish the
searchable-documentation-database objective I laid out at the
beginning of this document. There are two big issues: document
cataloguing and metadata.
The Scrollkeeper
project aims directly to meet this need. It provides a simple set of
script hooks that can be used by package install and uninstall
productions to register and unregister their documentation into and
out of a shared, searchable system-wide database.
Scrollkeeper uses the Open Metadata Format.
This is a standard for indexing open-source documentation analogous to
a library card-catalog system. The idea is to support rich search
facilities that use the card-catalog metadata as well as the source
text of the documentation itself.