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Subject: Re: [office-metadata] Rough Proposal for RDFa + RDF/XML/XForms + xml:id



So just to summarize my position on Michael's proposals on reflection:

On Feb 7, 2007, at 10:35 AM, Michael Brauer wrote:

> We therefore could add a meta data field. There are two options for
> this: First we may add attributes for the RDF subject and predicates, 
> and may define that the text content of the field is the literal RDF 
> object. I think that is very similar to a subset RDFa, except that the 
> meta data attributes are not attached to arbitrary elements, but that 
> there is a specific element that carries the meta data attributes, and 
> that these elements cannot nested.

I think this is a fine compromise. It solves this class of use case in 
a focused way, and we can always remove restrictions later if needed.

And it allows me to use the metadata attributes in my citation field as 
well I presume? E.g. the attributes would not be limited to the new 
field you are proposing? They would just excluded from spans and 
paragraphs and such.

> The other option is to have the meta data in separate stream (including
> the literal object), and to have attributes that specify what RDF
> literal objects shall be displayed. This takes us directly to XForms,
> the 2nd feature that we may reuse, as Svante is pointing out: XForms 
> can
> be used to bind controls and text fields (although we don't have the
> later right now) to RDF objects in an RDF-XML stream. This works 
> already in ODF 1.1 (but for controls only). It therefore seems to be 
> reasonable to reuse XForms for all those cases where the metadata is 
> in a separate stream in the package, and where we want to display
> some of the RDF objects in the content.

I like the idea of reusing XForms controls, but:

a) I consider this an implementation issue outside our scope (if people 
want to use XForms for editing RDF/XML instances, great, but it should 
not be our concern)

b) for the reasons Elias and I mentioned, I do not agree using XPath 
for data-display binding makes sense

In essence, yes to everything Michael wrote here, EXCEPT to the XForms 
data-binding idea.

We've talked about this many times in the past on this list. There are 
other mechanisms to achieve the desired outcome here (knowing what to 
display for a given subject reference in the content). The most simple 
one is a convention: use the rdf:value property of a resource. This is 
what the SIMILE Project at MIT does with its Piggy Bank Firefox 
browser.

A somewhat more complex solution is some sort of configuration file, 
which may well use RDF Schema and/or OWL.

Finally, datatype information can be helpful in configuring what UI 
control to use. This goes back to Florian's earlier suggestion that we 
encourage datatyping of literals.

WRT to yet more discussions of validation and so forth, it is not in 
the list of requirements we have to consider this. The closest one to 
this area is the one to choose a standard data model, such that any 
arbitrary metadata content may be at least displayed by conforming 
applications. It says -- quite deliberately -- nothing about editing or 
XML validation. And continuing to insist on this as a a requirement 
flies in the face of our agreement as represented in the use case and 
requirements document.

It's critical that we remain focused on that document or we cannot 
complete our work.

Finally, I want to remind people that the metadata work does not need 
to end at ODF 1.2. The list of what we agree on already would be a very 
nice addition on which to build later if needed. But we can't really 
know how developers will use this functionality unless we actually 
provide it.

We're so close to a final consensus here. I hope we can finalize that 
really soon.

Bruce



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