Re: [office-metadata] Is this the use case for RDFa?

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

On Dec 20, 2006, at 8:59 AM, Patrick Durusau wrote:

> Consider that I have a subject, one of John's patients and what 
> follows in the document are a number of statements about that patient.
>
> If I use the xml:id approach to mark the patient, in this case, say 
> <span xml:id="snowfall_1">Patrick Durusau</span> and then later in the 
> file there are other statements about this patient, omitted here for 
> medical privacy reasons, ;-), the question is how do those properties 
> "roll up" to be associated with that subject?
>
> Is that an accurate statement?

Yes!

> But, if I use an rdf:about attribute on a container, then those later 
> statements, according to RDFa will "roll up" to that subject?

Correct.

> Hmmm, that sounds to me like a question of how the properties that 
> represent the object and predicate of the triple are to be associated 
> with the property that identifies the subject.

Exactly! You're on a roll Patrick.

> And the argument that I understand Elais and Bruce to be making is 
> that the "roll up" is easy enough to see with the RDFa approach, 
> whereas using xml:id requires additional mechanisms. But both are 
> representing the same information.

Yes.

> Interesting.
>
> Which sheds some light on Elias's position on non-duplication of 
> content. It is "re-use" of the content inline so as to not replicate 
> it in the metadata file.

Also, yes, and I think this is what he was saying to Michael.

> But I suppose nothing prevents an application that mandates external 
> storage only, from transforming the "inline" metadata into metadata in 
> one or more metadata files.

Correct.

...

Bruce