Re: [office-metadata] notes on RDF profiling

[Bruce D'Arcus <bruce.darcus@OpenDocument.us>]

On Aug 23, 2006, at 10:54 AM, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:

> There's one problem that we at the bibliographic would definitely need 
> to get around, though, which is that author lists and such are 
> ordered, while the RDF model is not. This would take some thought 
> about how best to handle, but one suggestion that I'm liking from Ian 
> Davis is that one allow a position or order property (which is how 
> you'd do it in a relational database).

Come to think of it, in terms of requirements, I guess we might think 
of these questions:

1) Do we need to allow one metadata description to reference another?

2) Do we need to allow arbitrary extension (which includes 1)?

3) Do we need to allow merging of ODF metadata?

I put the questions this way because I think the unordered nature of 
the RDF model is necessary to enable 3 (but probably not 1 and 2). If 
you have two descriptions for the same thing, for example:

	<rdf:Description rdf:about="urn:x:1">
	   <dc:title xml:lang="en">A Title</dc:title>
	</rdf:Description>

... and:

	<rdf:Description rdf:about="urn:x:1">
	   <dc:title xml:lang="es">Un Titulo</dc:title>
	</rdf:Description>

... and you need to merge the descriptions, it becomes arguably 
impossible to do if order is significant.

My answer to the above three requirements questions is "yes".

While I could imagine a circumstance where we say "no" to #3, I 
actually think that would likely introduce more problems than it would 
solve (it would admittedly solve my problem with order above).

Still, something to consider.

Bruce