On 9/19/06, Jakob Lechner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
we recently also discussed metadata fields in our company. Here are our basic ideas: If such a field is inserted into an OOo document the text information linked with this field shall be renderd in the document. But we want these fields also to be modifiable, i.e. if the displayed text is changed in the document the data source also gets updated and subsequently all other fields that are inserted into the text and that point to the same data source.
Right. Can you give me some specific use case examples that might benefit from such a generic structured metadata field? Citations is one. I could imagine contacts would be another, where you link to a contact record.
We figured out that on one hand it should be possible link fields to document specific information (such as author, title, subject, ...). On the other hand it should be possible to embed a (user defined) xml structure into the document so a metadata field can be linked to a xml tag content or a xml tag attribute.
The idea of the metadata work at the ODF TC is to create an extensible metadata system within ODF. In this system, we would baically include general metadata properties, but would also define a model (almost surely RDF) that would allow people to include arbitrary metadata, but to do so in a way that generic metadata tools can understand. This is similar to Microsoft's custom schema support, but better ;-) Part of what we will need to do is to define a mechanism to associate content with metadata descriptions. This is why I'm asking about fields. Field contains an ID (optionally, though ideally, a URI), metadata descriptions stored separately in file package, rendered text tied to metadata.
You are right, the citation use case requires a bit more intelligence than just a simple field pointing to a single value but I think this is the point where we should start from. On top of these simple fields maybe complex fields can be implemented that can contain several simple field and have some sort of (use case specific) logic in order to organize the included simple fields.
Right, in what I'm imagining, a simple field might be just: <text:structuredField text:type="contact"> <text:source> <meta:reference meta:about="tag:person:x"/> </text:source> <text:body>Jane Doe</text:body> </text:structuredField> What is "complex" is then more the UI stuff. So maybe user would get a contextual menu that allowed actions tied to that metadata (email the person, etc.).
In the citation case a complex field would be needed that allows insertion or removal of references.
Correct.
On insertion the needed simple fields for the new reference (author, date) have to be inserted and reorganized together with existing fields (e.g. sort date fields).
It might be easier for a processor to just send the formatted text? But the field does need to be able to either work with the data fields locally, or send some parameters to the citation formetter to get the proper text returned. Not sure which is better.
Bibliography entries could be included in the document using fields that point to the appropriate entries in the bibliographic xml structure. Maybe a complex field that combines the simple fields could be defined: < <Author>: <Title>. <Publisher>. <Publication Date> >
The business of actually configuring the formatting of these fields is really complex. I wrote an entire language to describe it, and it wasn't easy (lots of conditional logic). http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/csl/
So the user just needs to insert one "citation" field into the text and link it to the right xml entry containing bibliographic data.
Yes, this is the idea. Question is if something like this is generally useful. I think yes, but was just wondering what people thought. Bruce --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
