A discussion is a species of docbase—that is, a set of documents that share common properties and that store semistructured data. With clever and determined use of the tools that create and view discussions, you can achieve excellent results. But in the Internet realm, message composers work with fixed-function message templates. You can’t, for example, add a Company or Project field to an Internet mail or news message. To do that, we shifted gears in Part II and explored how to build web docbases. These can handle the same kinds of semistructured data that we put into messages but don’t suffer from the constraints of a fixed-function template.

The template for a web docbase can be anything that you need it to be. You can define its metadata very simply using HTML <meta> tags or more elaborately using XHTML or full-blown XML. In Chapter 6, we built a system that uses XHTML record templates to help users preview and validate docbase records and that stores records in the same XHTML format. In Chapter 7, we extended that system, using the metadata to create navigational views of docbases. In Chapter 11, and Chapter 12, we tapped that metadata again to create subscription and authorization services based not only on group membership, but also on docbase attributes.

Every docbase is potentially a groupware application. It becomes one when you activate bindings, latent in the metadata, that connect docbase records to groups and their activities. Every scrap of metadata that you capture and store can pay back rich dividends, and you can mine that metadata in unusual places. In Chapter 8, we saw how URLs and HTML doctitles form namespaces that you can fruitfully manage as metadata repositories. We saw, as well, that it’s valuable to think of different species of docbases, including newsgroups and web archives, as components that plug into a common information architecture. Using the search mechanisms we explored in Chapter 8, you can define such an architecture abstractly, then adapt it to different kinds of docbases (or search engines). Doing that furthers groupware objectives by adding value to the docbases that you invite users to create.