RE: [oic] Test Assertions - Latest Set - Yet Another Use Case

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Something nagged at me and I decided to check further.

There are also interdependencies between pre-defined metadata and text fields.  These may be factors in what works for interchange of documents containing such metadata elements.  There are also mysterious references to other field information (in Chapter 6) whose source is rather baffling, since there are no corresponding metadata elements (e.g., author initials, author name and address).

I don't think there is anything to do about that other than notice that support of metadata will have to be reconciled with the support of fields.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:dennis.hamilton@acm.org] 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/oic/200904/msg00062.html
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 10:00
To: bart.hanssens@fedict.be; oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [oic] Test Assertions - Latest Set - Other Use Case

It also occured to me that there is another use case with regard to <office:meta>.  I am thinking about processes that extract metadata for maintaining external information about an ODF Document.  For example, an content-management system might rely on <office:meta> for (default) creation of CMS metadata about the document.  It is not clear how this becomes a matter of concern for the OIC work, though.

It is also conceivable that a CMS system might inject content into an <office:meta> element, although my experience is that this is generally a bad idea as an arbitrary automatic action, since it undermines the provenance of the document.

 - Dennis 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:dennis.hamilton@acm.org] 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/oic/200904/msg00061.html
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 09:29
To: bart.hanssens@fedict.be; oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [oic] Test Assertions - Latest Set

Here's a little more about my concerns, using <dc:creator> in <office:meta> as my specific example.  I'm looking at 
<http://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/svn/oic/TestSuite/branches/barth/odf11/assertions/html/metadata-dc-creator.html>
as of OIC SVN version 78.

The current provision for the <dc:creator> element is that it may occur none or more times in an <office:meta> element.  The ODF 1.1 specification declares that the "element specifies the name of the person who last modified the document."  It is also specified that "It is application-specific how to update multiple instances of the same elements."  (These conditions appear twice, once in section 2.2 and again at the beginning of section 3.1.)

Also, I thought "target" was not a specification but something that is an implementation of a (part of a) specification.  I am going to assume that targets are (1) documents, and (2) various aspects of document processing implementations.  I think there are several different target cases here.

This is the kind of thinking I have gone through in trying to separate out what we can interpret in the specification and what we have to look elsewhere for.  In the case of optionally-supported metadata, I don't see what we can do without creating our own normative sources, and they are going to be quite different, serving as guidelines or merely something to inspect for to understand whether guidelines are even needed.

Some Targets and Prescription-Level thinking:

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