Re: [office-metadata] Fw: News Release: W3C Completes Bridge Between HTML/Microformatsand Semantic Web with GRDDL

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

I guess I was thinking along the lines
of spreadsheet data.  Users commonly put in data tables, a few columns
of data with labels as headers.  These may start in row 1, or anywhere.
 If another application wants to operate on that data in the document,
they really don't know where to start.  What range do they look for?
 What are the data types of the columns?  It isn't really self-describing
because the column headers are really not headers in any formal sense.
 They are just cells containing labels.  It looks nice to the
eye, but it really isn't formally structured.


So what would you do if you wanted to
layer some structure on to the data?  I guess you could annotate with
RDF metadata and say things about the range and the headers.  But
another way might be to define via GRDDL a way to extract RDF from the
spreadsheet.  So not really metadata, but RDF to describe the actually
data of the sheet.  This could be powerful.

But I agree that this doesn't necessarily
intersect with our metadata work.  Both use RDF, but for different
purposes.

-Rob

___________________________

Rob Weir
Software Architect
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Software Group

email: robert_weir@us.ibm.com
phone: 1-978-399-7122
blog: http://www.robweir.com/blog/

Svante.Schubert@Sun.COM wrote on 09/12/2007 03:18:11
PM:

> Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> > robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:
> >
> >> Does this mean anything for us?  
> >
> > It might. It would allow, for example, someone to include some
custom 
> > XML in an ODF package, but include the GRDDL logic to convert
it to RDF.
> >
> > I'm not really sure of the practical use case for that, but I
imagine 
> > someone may find one.
> >
> GRDDL is a framework to extract RDF from plain XML by providing an
> algorithm (usually a reference to a XSLT stylesheet).
> We in ODF 1.2 offer more than a framework for plain XML, we offer
a 
> framework for package formats using XML files.
> 
> Instead of a GRDDL algorithm we rely on a fixed algorithm by in general
> annotating the relevant XML resources (element nodes) by xml:id 
> attributes and using one metadata manifest to relate xml:ids with
IRIs 
> and to describe related RDF files of the package.
> 
> Aside of this package metadata mechanism we define typical ODF resources
> (e.g. odf:ContentFile) and in content metadata of an ODF file (e.g.
> m:about, m:property).
> Making this ODF in content metadata extractable using GRDDL and XSLT
> seems possible, but would require the interpretation of the manifest
and 
> providing the XSLT stylesheet.
> 
> Not sure if it is worth the effort, as I doubt that a common GRDDL
agent 
> would even unzip an ODF document at all.
> I would further assume GRDDL would drop some of our nice features
as RDF 
> named graphs like we currently have for each RDF file.
> 
> Rather than looking on agents, I am more focused on the Office Extension
> developer, which might rely on some XSLT library as RDF TWIG when
> working with ODF metadata using XSLT. ;-)
> 
> regards,
> Svante (on vacation but could not resist)
> 
> [1] http://rdftwig.sourceforge.net/paper/index.html