Re: [office-metadata] Suggested Changes on the Metadata proposal

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Marbux.

marbux wrote:
> To all those who said we were being unreasonable to decide that we 
> were no longer willing to place our faith in Sun's leadership of the 
> OpenDocument Technical Committee, we give you Exhibit A. Sun 
> Microsystems is the enemy of ODF interoperability. It will be 
> interesting to see how those who eschew confrontation deal with these 
> proposals, which will -- if adopted -- eviscerate the Metadata SC's 
> work, allowing Sun to break interoperability with other applications.
>

As you may or may not know, Svante's first language is not English but 
he has done a hell of a lot better job than I would trying to write a 
standard in German.

Asking for more information before simply jumping to the conclusion that 
the proposals are the enemy of interoperability would be a more 
productive course.

Take the first proposal for instance:

> VI) Dropping non modification requirement
> "Metadata files should not be modified unless the content of the
> metadata file is changed.
>
> This sentence describes application behavior. The described behavior is
> moreover not essential, nor do we have something similar for ODF
> content, like keeping the XML structure, when the document is not being
> changed.
What is at issue is not modification of the metadata file but  
preservation of the metadata file.

In other words, an application might simply keep the metadata file but 
on the other hand, it might also read the metadata file and save it in 
another RDF syntax that it prefers for the file. Is that modification? 
Yes.  Is that preservation? Yes.

It may be that our wording was inelegant in the proposal in that the 
intent was to have the metadata preserved but not to restrict how that 
was done.

Since we don't constrain the RDF format in the first place, requiring it 
to not be modified doesn't really advance interoperability. One can 
expect to encounter RDF in a finite number of formats as specified by 
the W3C as the proposal is currently written. So taken at face value, if 
we preserve the metadata, we have no more and certainly no less 
interoperability than we did before.

You can argue that we should require some particular RDF format (I 
personally don't have strong feelings one way or the other) and that 
such format be preserved but that is a separate issue.

The key is understanding the technical aspects of what is being proposed 
and not simply assuming that every change is a change for the worse.

I have worked for a very long time on the metadata proposal and I have 
every intention of ODF having an interoperable metadata mechanism. I 
think I know enough about both to make sure that happens.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Acting Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)
Co-Editor, OpenDocument Format (OASIS, ISO/IEC 26300)