[whatwg] ODF and RDFa (was: Re: on microdata in html5)

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Henri Sivonen<hsivonen at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Jun 11, 2009, at 12:09, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
>
>> To make a long story short, ODF 1.2 will have an extensible metadata
>> system based on RDF/XML (for in--package metadata) and a subset of
>> RDFa.(for embedded).
>
> What kind of UI is envisioned for OpenOffice.org, Symphony, etc. for
> embedded (fork of?) RDFa?

I really don't know the implementation details, but the proposal in
general envisioned two primary cases:

1) simple content tagging ("this text is the title" and so forth)

2) more complex structured fields

ODF is not HTML, and so we had some liberties that allowed us to keep
the in-document metadata fairly narrow, and off-load more complex
stuff to in-package RDF/XML (which can in turn point to document
content).

So a subset of RDFa would be used for #1, and RDF/XML + a new metadata
field would often be used for #2.

As an example, then, for the citation case, you'd have metadata fields
to hold the rendered content in document, and then you'd attach those
fields to RDF/XML descriptions stored in-package. An extension would
work with these data.

AFAIK, the first implementation of the support in OOo is likely to
just put the API in place, which developers would in turn build on.

Svante Schubert from Sun posted slides from a talk he did on this:

<http://www.slideshare.net/jza/an-rdf-metadata-model-for-opendocument-format-12>

You'll note, though, he doesn't go into much detail about the UI.

I personally would like to see enhanced metadata enable the sort of UI
enhancements that are barely hinted at with some of Jeni Tennison's
work with RDFa in XHTML, where the UI can overlay richer information
about document content [1].

Bruce

[1] http://rdfquery.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/markup/markup.html