Re: [office-metadata] Example of rdfa in a medical note

[John Madden <john.madden@duke.edu>]

>>
>> If you put xml:id on every element single element that you ever   
>> referenced in the document your strategy would work fine.
>>
> This really should have been a default in ODF 1.0.
>



So let's fix it now, irrespective of all the other issues!!!






>> But isn't this just shifting the problem ?  Now I can't understand  
>> my  RDF without having the content document open onscreen next to it.
>>
> No. It is separating the purely technical XML problem of  
> associating two or more things together for some purpose in the  
> file from adding semantics to some content.
>
> One of the barriers that is ignored in RDFa is that the burden of  
> authoring RDF is too high. A lesson that SGML almost died learning.  
> Why would you author RDF by hand if you had a drop-down menu where  
> you could make the appropriate choices?



No, and you're right about the authoring issue. Bruce has made this  
point to me very forcefully on many occasions.

Just so you don't think I haven't considered this, I actually think  
the way to add rdf authoring is by means of some additions to the  
XForms module. It will be relatively easy to add rich content markup  
as rdf to docs that have some underlying forms-like structure, but  
much more difficult to come up with an acceptable UI to do it  
elsewhere.But that's an entirely different discussion.

Nevertheless, there are some things that lie in the middle. This  
business about identifying a section of a document as being a  
particular kind of a section --- like this section is a  
"pateintProfile". That's potentially automatable without a lot of pain.





> Leads to more consistent results and is easier to teach. Possibly  
> less powerful but as Michael Sperberg-McQueen said in a  
> conversation at XML 2006: "Generality is greatly over-rated." ;-)


Amen,  but with some reservations ;-)

John