ODF 1.2 metadata for embedded documents

[Svante Schubert <Svante.Schubert@Sun.COM>]

Dear TC members,

During implementing the ODF 1.2 metadata feature in OpenOffice.org, we
faced some metadata scenarios, which draw our attention back to the
metadata specification of ODF 1.2.
As general overview of this feature we created a task [1] and a wiki [2]
to list all relevant user scenarios.

But the most interesting and releveant scenario is the following:
It is possible to embed an ODF document within an ODF document. For
instance to embed a spreadsheet document within an text document and
later separate or remove the embedded document from the host document again.
Both documents might have metadata before merging and should still have
their metadata sets after splitting the documents.
Even more it is preferable that the metadata RDF files from the embedded
documents are split up according to their usage, when the ODF
documents are being separated.

We came to the conclusion that this scenario can much easier be
implemented if every embedded ODF document has its own metadata manfiest 
(ie. manifest.rdf), located in the directory of the embedded
document (aside its content.xml). This would help us to handle a
metadata repository separately for every embedded document, allowing us
to split the metadata easily as required by the scenario above.

We further suggest, that the manifest.rdf files of the embedded
documents are NOT linked by the host document manifest.rdf - as linking
is not an explicit RDF/XML feature - but are defined by their entry in
the manifest.xml of the ODF package.

If you would agree on this, I would prepare are wording for the ODF
specification.

Regards,
Svante

[1] http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=91562
[2] 
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer/Metadata_Support#Handling_of_metadata_on_editing.2Fupdating_an_text_document

-- 
Sun Microsystems GmbH           Svante Schubert
Nagelsweg 55                    Software Engineer
20097 Hamburg                   StarOffice / OpenOffice.org Development
Germany                         Phone: +49(0)40 236 46 500
http://www.sun.com              Svante.Schubert@sun.com

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