Public Comment

[comment-form@oasis-open.org]

Comment from: s.bonfigli@mclink.it

Name: Sandro Bonfigli
Title: Use case for metadata?

I'd like to signal to the Committee a situation; I wonder if this could be a use case for 
the metadata sub committee.

It would be possible to insert code of a different application inside an ODF document?
Let me show you an esample: Sweave
http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~leisch/Sweave/FAQ.html
http://www.stat.umn.edu/~charlie/Sweave/foo.pdf

Sweave permits to create Latex files with R code intermixed inside them 
(for R look at http://www.r-project.org/) so you first evaluate the R code, 
then trasform the Latex file with the freshly generated results.

I think that ODF could do something like this with a tag [I'll oversimplify] like this 
<code of application X> if !a than plot(b) </code of application X>.

The user could of course define a style for the code (even invisible).

The external application could implement a parser which should look only for the tags 
of interest to evaluate its input; this should be possible in a "simple" way.

The external application should be able to generate the output (text, tables, 
perhaps images) in a suitable way; I think this will be possible with a 
"plug in" for many external application (like the example with Sweave and R).


The possible uses would be a lot: a sort of reporting tool "on steroids", the possibility
to write a scientific article with embedded the procedure used to obtain the results
(at the end obtaining something like Mathematica notebooks 
http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/publishing/overview.html),
and so on.
Of course there would be the need of a simple way to delete the external application code, 
which could be for internal use only.

I wonder if you think this situation is interesting.

I also wonder if this could be implemented via the use of metadata, either in a predefined
way or by permitting the user to define its own set.

Thank You in advance for your attention.

Sandro