Must preserve?

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Bruce,

I may have just missed another way of saying it but I did not notice a 
requirement that metadata must be preserved.

Granted, that will be an issue for the entire TC to decide on for ODF 
1.2 but I think it flows out of the metadata extensions and needs to be 
mentioned as necessary for many of the metadata use cases.

I think we need to add conversion to the "summarized" use cases as it is 
the one that makes the clearest case for preservation of metadata.

If I convert from some foreign format to ODF and include metadata that 
will facilitate conversion back to the foreign format, if that metadata 
is dropped by any ODF application, then I have lost the ability to go 
back to that format.

Note that I am *not* suggesting that any ODF application must recognize 
or process such metadata, but it must preserve what it does not 
understand. Some ODF applications will be able to use that metadata to 
insure clean export back to the foreign format or other purposes. Nor is 
any ODF application required to be able to export back to a foreign 
format. But, all ODF applications should preserve the metadata that 
makes that possible.

More comments forthcoming.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Patrick@Durusau.net
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!