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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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