Re: [office-metadata] Finding a common proposal..

[Svante Schubert <Svante.Schubert@Sun.COM>]

Hi Bruce,

Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
>
> ...
>
>> On the other hand, if you define "Doe" and "1999" as further areas of 
>> meta data, it would enable you to keep them consistent with any 
>> reference you have.
>> Therefore consistency is the requirement you asked for.
>
> Remember, the use case is pretty specific that a citation's 
> presentation can radically change, including not only the specific 
> properties included, but the order of the resources, whether they are 
> presented in-text or in footnotes, etc., etc.
>
> E.g. the same citation can be presented like:
>
>     (Doe, 1999; Smith, 2000a:23)
>     (Smith, 2000a, p23; Doe, 1999)
>     [1]
>     (1) footnote mark, with full references in the footnote text   
> .... and any number of variants. User needs to be able to change 
> between them in real-time, without modifying the source.
>
> Your proposal doesn't solve that problem I'm afraid. Those metadata 
> properties (in your example the authors' family names, and the year of 
> publication, plus a year disambiguation suffix that can only be known 
> by processing the entire in-document list of citation references; it's 
> not intrinsic to the bibliographic metadata) are only really relevant 
> to one kind of presentation style. They're pretty much irrelevant to 
> last two, and in the footnote example, you need much more metadata to 
> keep things -- as you say -- consistent.
We have to distinguish between features of a special citation plug-in - 
like the change between citations, and the need to make the relevant 
data recognizable for everybody by marking the relevant sub-parts as 
meta-data, enabling by this the possibility of validation of the sub-parts.
>
> Nevermind RDF and such; just go back to BibTeX. This proposal just 
> uses the same approach, but updated for the 21st century. It's also 
> the same basic approach MS is using in Word 2007/ OOXML (again, minus 
> the RDF).
The argument that others do it as well is only valid for real standards. 
In relation of MS only interoperability counts for us.
>
>> BTW I found an argument for the design decision, that all viewable 
>> content should remain in the content.xml. The reason: as multiple 
>> meta data might like to refer to it, we would otherwise end up with 
>> inconsistencies of data copies in various meta files as multiple 
>> plug-in would handle the data independently.
>
> In fact, one of the reasons I embarked on all this is because the 
> existing ODF citation solution is fatally flawed in its design, 
> precisely because metadata is added as attributes to each citation 
> (text:bibliographic-mark). In a book where I might cite the same 
> reference 50 times, that's a whole lot of redundant metadata.
Did I get it right, that you argue to move repeating presentation of 
citation to the meta data?
By referencing from the content.xml to meta.xml and viewing data only 
stored in the meta.xml?
>
> Given all this, isn't it easier to just treat the presentation content 
> as that black box?
Yes, as long the it does not contain semantic sub-parts.
>
> Bruce
>
Regards,
Svante