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Subject: Re: [office-metadata] Groups - Metadata SC meeting modified
On Jul 26, 2006, at 10:19 AM, Patrick Durusau wrote: > Might be useful for people to start posting requirements for use cases > of interest to them and then we can discuss over the mailing list. Good idea. FWIW, here's part of a draft I wrote about six months ago, tweaked a bit given more recent discussions. My first attempt to write one of these, so am not sure how well I've got it! It at least ought to give us something to talk about once we've cleared the use case hurdle. Design Goals ============ Balance Expressiveness and Ease of Implementation ------------------------------------------------- Extended metadata must be easy for application developers to implement, yet support rich description capabilities. This is consistent with the OpenDocument TC's charter that the format "must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based languages or tools." Reuse Existing Open Standards ----------------------------- Wherever possible, the extended metadata support should use or adapt existing standards and best practices. This follows from the TC charter that OpenDocument "should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever possible and permitted." Given that RDF provides a well-developed open standard that could be seen as more-or-less a superset of the current OpenDoucment metadata support, it would be sensible to adopt it in some form, either directly (probably as a syntactic subset), or via a mapping. Interoperability ---------------- Interoperability with the current OpenDocument metadata support, RSS 1.0, and XMP as three standards should be prioritized. Where possible, the extension mechanism should be implemented in a backwards-compatible way. Requirements ============ Support Dublin Core and Qualified Dublin Core --------------------------------------------- Dublin Core and Qualified Dublin Core (also called Extended Dublin Core) provide well-known and widely-implemented metadata vocabularies that can provide rich base support for a wide-variety of use cases. The current Dublin Core support should be enhanced, then, with support for Qualified Dublin Core. Allow Restricted Foreign-Namespaced Extension ------------------------------------------------- While the base Dublin Core and Qualified Dublin Core modules would cover many metadata needs, the specification should also allow for the addition of arbitrary foreign-namespaced content, subject to certain restrictions so that it conforms to the same metadata model. Compliant editors must preserve this metadata. Define Levels of Conformance ---------------------------- The specification shall define levels of conformance. Metadata Descriptions Shall Be Stored Apart from the Content ------------------------------------------------------------ The OpenDocument Technical Committee's Charter states that the format "should keep the document's content and layout information separate such that they can be processed independently of each other." The same should be true of metadata descriptions when they are embedded in the file archive. Resources as Objects -------------------- It should be possible to treat resource properties as referenced objects. It should be possible to treat a document author, for example, as a full linked "Person" object, rather than simply strings. Use IRI's for Identification and Linking ---------------------------------------- To allow for the treatment of metadata relations and properties as objects suggests a mechanism to uniquely identify them. IRI's provide for just that mechanism, and are already widely-supported in OpenDocument, RDF, Topic Maps, and so forth. Styles and Content Elements Shall Allow Attributes to Link (via IRI) to Metadata Descriptions ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------- To enable easy metadata tagging of document content and support for dynamic fields, the specification shall make use of existing infrastructure, such as styles and content attributes. Use the OpenDocument Packaging Support to Register Metadata ----------------------------------------------------------- Allowing custom metadata to be embedded in files suggests a mechanism to register that metadata as such. The existing OpenDocument packaging mechanism can support that. XForms Mapping -------------- It should be possible to edit and create such metadata using XForms.
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