From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu May 16 2002 - 13:00:18 EDT
At 06:13 PM 5/16/02 +0200, Kenneth Rohde Christiansen wrote:
>Wouldn't it be an idea to discuss this metadata support with the other
>Gnome Office developers, like the Gnumeric ones, so we don't end up with
>very different systems?
Are you volunteering? :-) Do you know of anyone else who's already working
on this problem that we should be listening to?
It's a good point, though. In the office suite space, there are two
dominant sets of metadata to consider:
- the widely-used MSFT schema
- the smaller, more precise Dublin Core (DC) schema
Our goal is to have a superset approach which:
- can express/translate all of the MS/RTF/etc metadata
- uses DC intelligently for as many of those as makes sense
Thus, there could be as many as three levels of consensus among XML-based
office products on how to use those schemas:
1. Everyone agrees on which subset of the MS schema maps one-to-one onto
the DC schema. For example, we all use dc.title, dc.date.created,
etc. for the same bits in an MSOffice file.
2. Everyone uses the same property names for the remainder of the MS
schema. For example, these could all be prefixed using the rtf.* and/or
ole2.* namespaces.
3. Everyone uses the custom.* namespace for user-defined properties.
Or, better yet, we all use the user.* namespace for this. ;-)
4. Everyone uses the same XML markup to store the keys and values for
all that metadata.
For the purposes of interoperability, I'd say that:
- #1 is critical,
- #3 and perhaps #2 would be nice, and
- #4 is much much less important to me.
Still, the bottom line is that someone has to do the job right at least
once. Anyone who wants to coordinate a proactive effort to get other people
involved in this should feel free to go ahead.
At this point, I just want to make sure we have a solution that meets all of
our needs.
Paul,
who'd like to avoid the abiword.* namespace wherever possible
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