Re: [office-metadata] data-typing

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

On Mar 2, 2007, at 11:43 AM, Svante Schubert wrote:

>   3. Introducing new attributes (e.g. meta:value and meta:value-type),
>      but reusing as well the attribute value set of the existing
>      attributes (office:value and office:value-type)
>
> Today I tend to solution three, but I am curious about the opinion of 
> Patrick and Michael as editors of the ODF spec.

The more I think about it, the more I also agree.

However, I'm also a little uneasy about the existing  ODF values.

The problem with reusing something like the existing "date" type in ODF 
is that it's not very precisely defined. It is either an xsd:date or an 
xsd:dateTime. That wouldn't work too well for the RDF. We'd essentially 
have one way to data-type the RDF/XML, and another the ODF content, and 
it wouldn't be clear how to convert from the latter to the former (at 
least in the "date" case; you'd have to first check the value and then 
use that to output the correct data-type).

Also, it's just a string that has no meaning beyond ODF (data-types are 
URIs in RDF and XML Schema).

So I guess we're left with a question of whether we really gain 
anything by reusing the existing data-type values, when the RDF/XML a) 
won't have any restrictions of its data-types and b) they will be 
defined as URIs?

Bruce