Re: [office-metadata] Define a Mechanism to Associate Metadata with Content?

[Bruce D'Arcus <bruce.darcus@OpenDocument.us>]

On Sep 13, 2006, at 9:18 AM, Patrick Durusau wrote:

> With regard to this requirement, don't we need a mirror requirement 
> for structure?
>
> Something along the lines of:
>
> Define a Mechanism to Associate Metadata with Structure?

What do you mean by "structure"?

> In particular the need to preserve metadata for conversion to and from 
> foreign formats comes to mind.

I'm not clear this is within our scope. There are lots of ways to do 
conversion; why is this "metadata"?

> Easy enough to do by specifying a format for metadata that records the 
> metadata and uses XPath expressions to apply it to the ODF document.
>
> We would have to specifically say that the XPath principle that the 
> most specific path expression applies so that conversions could 
> address any part of the ODF document.
>
> I suspect that with metadata and XPath expressions would greatly 
> assist in the effort to reach an consensus on UOF and ODF.

As above. If we need an "interoperability subcommittee" then we should 
create one alongside the UOF effort, but we can't make this be all 
things to all problems.

> Let's be realistic. All office systems are going to be at best 
> heterogeneous environments for the forseeable future. Some may be 
> exclusively one foreign format or another. Displacing those systems 
> with ODF based applications, even assuming ODF applications were an 
> order of magnitude or more better in some respect, is a process that 
> will take years. As a former sysadmin I can assure you that "upgrade" 
> was a nasty word and "replacement" was almost unthinkable except in 
> incremental steps.
>
> If we can enhance the metadata for ODF such that ODF applications can 
> seamlessly fit into current systems, whatever those may be, and such 
> applications demonstrate a real value add over other applications, 
> then they can incrementally replace systems with a greater cost or 
> less abilities. Some people may simply take the plunge and do 
> wholesale conversion and seamless interoperability with legacy formats 
> will be a plus there as well.

I'm really not following the use case tie-back here Patrick.

To take my own use case, there is nothing that you are talking about 
here that presents any problem for interoperability with, for example, 
Open XML. I've been following what MS is doing with their bibliographic 
metadata stuff in Word 2007 and Open XML, and talking to them about it. 
  Converting between their format and what I would like to see in ODF is 
a simple XSLT. No problem *at all*.

As I said in a previous message, foreign XML can already be embedded in 
files. So I really don't see why this is something for us to worry 
about.

Bruce