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

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

On Dec 6, 2006, at 10:51 AM, Patrick Durusau wrote:

>> But let's be clear: when you move the metadata out of the content, 
>> you lose other functionality; for example, the ability for the user 
>> to be able to access specific chunks of content as metadata-enhanced; 
>> imagine being able to hover over a span of metadata-enhanced text 
>> that represents a client -- "Jane Doe" -- and having the application 
>> display additional information about them.
>>
> Sorry, I don't see why you would say that? Where is the loss of 
> functionality?

Heh, good point :-)

This is a simple example that doesn't show what I mean (as I said, long 
day yesterday!).

But say if you have a more complex statement (or series of them) in the 
text -- "Patrick is attending the XML2006 conference" -- and both the 
subject ("Patrick") and the object ("XML2006 conference") are resources 
with additional metadata (you have your vCard embedded in the package). 
If you have that triple in the package, then the string "Patrick" isn't 
going to be identified as a discrete metadata object in the content 
file. Now, the entire span or field might get highlighted and you could 
then access that further information, but it wouldn't be directly 
accessible from the text.

That's all I mean.

But thanks for clarifying.

> Actually I have been told there are advantages to having separate 
> files, even though a little bit harder with XSLT. You have all the 
> notes, for example, in a separate file which enables them to be 
> processed separately and without a larger content model than 
> necessary. Thinking that with metadata there might be similar 
> advantages.

Exactly. It is indeed analogous (and in an ideal blank slate world, 
notes and comments could be understood as metadata).

> Where in a medical situation I want to extract all the metadata from 
> an entire store of documents for navigational purposes, say all the 
> times Doctor X entered a prescription for valium for patient Y. Should 
> not be necessary for me to process all the document content to get 
> that answer. If the metadata resides in content.xml, I do.

Yes, also right. There is a design trade-off. I (and I think Elias) are 
just saying that it's hard to legislate what ought to be 
context-specific design decisions. Generally keep the metadata out of 
the content file, but not disallow it.

Bruce