Re: [office-metadata] RDF/XML and XPath

[Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Hi Bruce,

Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> 
> On Feb 8, 2007, at 6:22 AM, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - 
> Hamburg wrote:
> 
>> But in the meantime we noticed that we seem to try to find a solution 
>> for something we have already a solution for in ODF. If someone finds 
>> a solution for linking text fields to specific triples in the RDF-XML 
>> that works without implementing a full RDF model, than this would be 
>> fine for me. But until now, we didn't find that solution, so it seems 
>> to be reasonable to go back to what we have and to restrict the RDF-XML.
> 
> But I think it's useful to point out that you and Svante are still 
> focusing too much on XML. Every time you see a potential problem, you 
> look for an XML solution to it.

Yes, you are right, XML is important for us. It's because ODF is defined 
to be a "XML-based file format specification for office applications", 
and because our TC's charter explicitly says that "it must be friendly 
to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based languages or tools".

So, using RDF via RDF-XML is in general fine for me. But if RDF-XML is 
difficult to handle by XML application, then I think we should consider 
to restrict it to a subset that works well in the XML world, instead of 
requiring that applications implement an RDF model. Since we are not 
talking about something new but only a subset of RDF-XML, it remains of 
cause possible to create RDF models, so we actually would combine both 
worlds.

But not only XML applications benefit from restring the RDF-XML, but ODF 
benefits from that as well, because we can reuse things we have 
specified already (the XForms bindings) and that have turned out to work 
well (in the XML world). This helps to keep the specification size 
small, simplifies ODF implementations, and saves us work when preparing 
the specification.

I hope this makes my position regarding RDF/XML and XPath/XForms clearer.

Best regards

Michael
> 
> Consider implementation. Elias -- who has a lot of implementation 
> experience in this area -- has been repeatedly saying that the way you 
> implement this is you load up the RDF triples into a model. At that 
> point everything is bound via URIs; you have a graph that you can move 
> around with ease.
> 
> In that model, there is no XPath: it's all URIs and literals. You 
> navigate the graph via the URIs. So it makes sense that the way we 
> display data in content would also be based on that notion.
> 
> I hope you agree that in any case a simple attribute to denote the 
> display property will work fine.
> 
> Bruce
> 


-- 
Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org
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D-20097 Hamburg, Germany          michael.brauer@sun.com
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