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Subject: Re: [office] Proposed TC Meeting Agenda Items
On Jan 17, 2006, at 11:00 AM, Florian Reuter wrote: >> The complexity of the metadata issue is really just in the details. >> They are not hard to work out though. > > You would be surprised how complex the issue of metadata can be in > case of OpenDocument. E.g. I recently talked to philologist > researchers, who e.g. would like to annotate greek texts with meta > data. We had a short discussion about meta data support in > OpenDocument, which is different to your requirements. What I learned > from that is, that we definitely need to do some fundamental research. > As a researcher I'm sure you agree, that a broader approach is called > for, given the depth of the issue. We should not rush this and focus > on special cases (e.g. bibliography). I also believe that users of > OpenDocument will appreciate this. Sigh ... With all due respect Florian, I have always been of the opinion that we ought to do this carefully, and do this right. I have not said that annotation is not worth considering, but it is yet another issue separate from the more basic issues of how to allow extensible metadata description, and how to use that to describe the content of document parts. I find it VERY hard to believe that any researcher would consider detailed annotation support in OpenDocument more important than flexible document level and bibliographic (and other sub-document metadata) support. One of the reasons LaTeX was a big success in many research fields was precisely because of BibTeX. In any case, good annotation support presupposes good general metadata support. So why can't we proceed on that basis? If you insist on solving ALL of this at one time -- including the annotation stuff -- you will spend the next few years doing it. It has been a subject that the DocBook people have been looking at for years, and they only just settled on a solution a few months ago [1]. The alternative is that we at the OpenOffice bibliographic project will just go off and write our own metadata support that will be incompatible with the current document metadata support, and will not be standardized. If someone decides to implement a bibliographic module in KOffice, they will do the same thing. Does anyone really believe that's a good idea? We need this support, and it needs to be standardized. I know in general companies don't care much about higher ed, but I'm giving you all a real use case, a way to separate out the different issues (description, storage, annotation), and I'm even giving you a reasonable way to address it in a way not limited to this use case. What is so hard about agreeing we ought to allow extensible metadata descriptions in the file wrapper? What I object to is not that people recognize it's a complicated issue that bears further research and discussion, but that Michael has proposed to stop the conversation, except in the context of a face-to-face that I cannot reasonably attend. Bruce [1] http://norman.walsh.name/2005/10/17/annotations
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