Mapping OpenDocuemnt metadata to RDF

[Lars Oppermann <Lars.Oppermann@Sun.COM>]

Hi all,

During the last call, I started to talk a bit of how a mapping of our 
meta data into RDF would look like.

These are the requirements of such a mapping, that I can currently think of:
- must scale with extensions to meta.xml schema
- must work in both directions, so changes to the resulting RDF
   model can be reflected in the meta.xml schema
- additional RDF statements in meta.xml must be able to reference
   the statements made in meta.xml in order to make further statements

so currently in meta.xml, we make our statements like this:

<office:meta>
   <dc:creator>John Smith</dc:creator>
   <dc:date>2005-06-27T12:12:52</dc:date>
   <meta:user-defined meta:name="Info 1">Hello World!</meta:user-defined>
</office:meta>

leaving out the user-defined fields for now, this could be easily 
represented in RDF XML syntax like this:

<rdf:RDF>

   <rdf:Description rdf:about="">
     <dc:creator>John Smith</dc:creator>
     <dc:date>2005-06-27T12:12:52</dc:date>
     <meta:user-defined rdf:nodeID="_user_defined_1">
   </rdf:Description>

   <rdf:Description rdf:nodeID="_user_defined_1">
     <meta:name>Info 1</meta:name>
     <meta:value>Hello World!</meta:value>
   </rdf:Description>

</rdf:RDF>

However, if additional statements were to be made, it is my current 
understanding of RDF, that I could make them about any of the things, 
that were defined as strings in the RDF i have given above.

A possible solution to this could be, to define a nodeID for every field 
that we use in meta.xml, so instead of mapping to

<dc:creator>John Smith</dc:creator>

we would map to a blank node

<dc:creator rdf:nodeID="creator_node"/>

and make a statement about that node later

<rdf:Description nodeID="creator_node">
   <dc:creator>John Smith</dc:creator>
</rdf:Description>

that way, anybody could make further statements about the creator.

I am not sure, whether the duplicate usage of the dc:creator predicate 
is a sound way to do this, I am still quite new to all the semantic web 
modeling approaches, so I'd be happy to receive your feedback on this.

Bests,
~Lars

-- 
Lars Oppermann <lars.oppermann@sun.com>               Sun Microsystems
Software Engineer - StarOffice                           Sachsenfeld 4
Phone: +49 40 23646 959                                D-20097 Hamburg
Fax:   +49 40 23646 550                  http://www.sun.com/staroffice