Re: [office-metadata] Focus on model

[Lars Oppermann <Lars.Oppermann@Sun.COM>]

Florian, and all the others...

I did not follow the recent discussion in all its detail, please let me 
know if I'm going into the wrong direction here.

 From what I have read during the last days, I was of the impression, 
that marking fragments of OD content as subjects about which metadata 
statements are made is a well agreed upon concept. I got the impression 
that most of the problems were in cases, where OD content should be used 
as the object of such a statement.

Consider the statement

{the_fragment-called_A; was_authored_by"; "John Smith"}
{the_fragment-called_A; was_authored_by"; "John Smith"}

Assuming document content like this

<t:span xml:id="A">blah blah blah</t:span>

This could be encoded in an RDF/XML-like fashion as already noted like this:

<rdf:RDF>
   <rdf:Description rdf:about="#A">
     <dc:author>John Smith</dc:author>
   </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

 From what I understood from the ongoing discussion, it is not yet clear 
how this can be done, if the "resource" 'Jonh Smith' is to appear as 
part of the document content, so as to avoid any redundancy. Consider we 
have content as this:

<t:span xml:id="A">blah blah blah</t:span>
<t:span xml:id="B">John Smith</t:span>
<t:span xml:id="C">14 December 2006</t:span>

We can reformulate the previous RDF/XML example to read as follows:

<rdf:RDF>
   <rdf:Description rdf:about="#A">
     <dc:author rdf:resource="#B">
     <dc:date rdf:resource="#C">
   </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

What use-cases can't be implemented by this simplistic approach? Why is 
there a need to introduce anything beyond a mechanism for referring to 
fragments into the content?

Thanks,
Lars


Florian Reuter wrote:
> Dear collegues,
> 
> may I suggest a way to approach consensus in our discussion. To me we mix the encoding problem (RDFa, IDs, Styles) with
> the problem of the underlying metadata statements we would like to allow.
> 
> I would suggest to first try to get a consensus about which statements we would like to allow and then talk about the
> way we would like to encode them in OD.
> 
> The first question is whether we can get an agreement which kind of statement we would like to allow and at the very
> beginning whether this should be RDF (subject, predicate, object) statements or something different.
> 
> If we agree on RDF triples as the underlying model, then I guess we need to talk about what special OD items we would
> like to allow beeing a "suject". E.g. candidates would be "paragraphs", "spans", etc.
> 
> If we agree on this and our use cases can be solved using the underlying metadata model we have in mind, then we can
> talk about how we can encode then in OD either by using an RDFa like approcach, a style-based approach or an ID-based
> approach.
> 
> Does this makes sense or am I off thead?
> 
> ~Florian
> 


-- 
Lars Oppermann <lars.oppermann@sun.com>               Sun Microsystems
Software Engineer                                         Nagelsweg 55
Phone: +49 40 23646 959                         20097 Hamburg, Germany
Fax:   +49 40 23646 550                  http://www.sun.com/staroffice