Re: [office-metadata] Binding proposal

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

On Mar 21, 2007, at 3:54 AM, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - 
Hamburg wrote:

> Having that said: The only choice we in my opinion have is to have ids 
> in all documents, where most of them are unmaintained and therefore 
> most likely not meaningful,

I think this is a little strong, in the sense that in the common case 
(user creates new files, and saves it), the ID can be easily created 
without their knowledge and without any issues of maintenance. The 
common case is no problem.

The only problem areas we have identified are situations where users 
either a) do a copy and then edit those files independently, adding 
metadata statements to each of those changed sections, and b) creates a 
"new" document that is not really new, but based on an existing 
document.

> or to have ids only in those documents where they most likely are 
> maintained only, and to have no id (or the location of the document 
> only) for all other document. My preference actually is the later, 
> because it allows you to differ between the document with (most 
> likely) maintained ids and those with unmaintained ids.

For sake of argument, if we require a document URI, it could be empty. 
And requiring a UUID could be with the caveat that implementors should 
consider the above problem cases and try to account for them (unless we 
can come up with some clever solution to them now).

I want you to consider things from the other side, though:

If documents don't have a URI, how do you propose to allow statements 
like:

<http://ex.net/this> ex:draft <http://ex.net/that> .

...? Or say a series of chapters files in a book:

<http://ex.net/book/chapters/1> dcterms:isPartOf <http://ex.net/book> .

If you leave the URI optional, you force users to take on the burden of 
identification. And if things aren't identified, they cannot be 
referenced.

Bruce