Public Comment

[comment-form@oasis-open.org]

Comment from: schuster@mskgmbh.com

embedding of meta information into digital 
documents

Dear TC-members:
I have been following your work on a standard format for digital documents 
with very much interest for some time now since, at my house, I manage the
project 1dok.org ( http://www.1dok.org ).
You might be interested to hear what 1dok.org would consider useful to add
to the Office format, and regard this as a contribution to your work.

Our suggestion concerns the embedding of meta information into digital 
documents (meta.xml).
In your specification, you have fixed arbitrary XML-based structures to be 
stored in the meta.xml as meta information.This is very important in order
to have also complex semantic markups incorporated in digital documents in
the future, in addition to the presentation oriented markup. 

At http://www.1dok.org/eng/framesetimplOOo.html ,
we have chosen the example of an invoice to demonstrate how this could look
like. As you can see, the contents marked up within the meta.xml are not taken
over into the meta.xml in this example but remain in the content.xml and are
referenced here. This solution would guarantee the file format to be compact and
redundancy-free.

For an efficient realization of this solution, it would be helpful if the 
XML-elements contained in the content.xml could be extended by an optional
attribute (metaindex=..., e.g.), if appropriate, connecting the XML-elements
with the corresponding ones from the meta.xml.

Ex: An invoice document contains an invoice number (InvoiceNo). It is marked
up as such in the meta.xml and is referenced with the help of the 
meta index '20'. 
According to the layout of the document, the character string '1234567' 
representing the invoice number is embedded in a tagged paragraph (text:p) 
within the content.xml. 

The paragraph bears the attribute metaindex=20 enabling the reference to the
corresponding semantic markup.

meta.xml:
...
<rdf:Description xsi:type="ed:Invoice">
	...
	<!-- the InvoiceNo is referenced by index=20-->
	<ed:invoiceNo>20</ed:invoiceNo>
	...
</rdf:Description>
...

content.xml:
...
<text:p text:style-name="P4" metaindex=''20''>1234567</text:p>
...

Hoping that this suggestion will meet with your interest, I would appreciate 
your comment and be looking forward to your answer.

Sincerely yours,

Bernd Schuster
1dok.org