Define a Mechanism to Associate Metadata with Content?

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings!

With regard to this requirement, don't we need a mirror requirement for 
structure?

Something along the lines of:

Define a Mechanism to Associate Metadata with Structure?

In particular the need to preserve metadata for conversion to and from 
foreign formats comes to mind.

Easy enough to do by specifying a format for metadata that records the 
metadata and uses XPath expressions to apply it to the ODF document.

We would have to specifically say that the XPath principle that the most 
specific path expression applies so that conversions could address any 
part of the ODF document.

I suspect that with metadata and XPath expressions would greatly assist 
in the effort to reach an consensus on UOF and ODF.

Not to mention that ambitious ODF applications could use that metadata 
to mimic the behavior found in other systems to insure seamless export 
to the foreign format.

Let's be realistic. All office systems are going to be at best 
heterogeneous environments for the forseeable future. Some may be 
exclusively one foreign format or another. Displacing those systems with 
ODF based applications, even assuming ODF applications were an order of 
magnitude or more better in some respect, is a process that will take 
years. As a former sysadmin I can assure you that "upgrade" was a nasty 
word and "replacement" was almost unthinkable except in incremental steps.

If we can enhance the metadata for ODF such that ODF applications can 
seamlessly fit into current systems, whatever those may be, and such 
applications demonstrate a real value add over other applications, then 
they can incrementally replace systems with a greater cost or less 
abilities. Some people may simply take the plunge and do wholesale 
conversion and seamless interoperability with legacy formats will be a 
plus there as well.

Hope everyone is 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!