Re: [office-metadata] Fields question

[Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Hi Patrick,

Patrick Durusau wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> Something to think about between now and our meeting.
> 
> Curious about the question of the "semantics" of a field.
> 
> I am assuming that a field is something that has content supplied based 
> upon some mechanism.

Yes, that's correct.

> 
> That is that a field per se really has no semantics.

I'm not sure. The fields that we have already in ODF specify what 
content is supplied, for instance the current date, the author of a 
document, the value of a variable, or the value of a "field" in a 
database table.

The new metadata is somehow different, because here the ODF 
specification itself will not specify what the content will be. So I 
think it would be okay to say that it per se has no semantics.

> 
> Assuming that we attach metadata to a field, then the field has content 
> if there is a plugin that processes the metadata and supplies the 
> content. What semantics that has is really up to the metadata and its 
> plugin.

Yes, I think that's correct.

> 
> Reasoning that we could do something similar to what is done with data 
> pilot. If a field has been filled by an ODF application with the 
> appropriate metadata plugin, then that information persists even if the 
> document is opened with an ODF application that does not have the 
> appropriate plugin. Thinking that takes care of the cases where a user 
> may not have the appropriate plugin.

Actually, the fields that we have already do exactly what you describe 
above. Its content is always the value of the field when it has been 
saved, and an application that does not know the field may display that 
content. I would suggest that the metadata fields behaves like this, too.

I hope this helps.

Michael
> 
> Hope everyone is having a great day!
> 
> Patrick
> 


-- 
Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org
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