Bibliographic/Developer Page/Metadata Implementation Proposal

The ODF TC has in principle approved enhanced metadata support [pdf] for ODF 1.2. This is fantastically cool stuff, and gives ODF:

1. a simple, flexible, and extensible data model (RDF)

2. the ability to use it to describe not just the document, but pieces within the document (tables, images, etc.), including ...

3. a new generic field

WRT to implementing it in OOo, some suggested reading: [Bootstrapping RDF applications with Redland], [librdf.org]

Redland seems to have the characteristics that would be good for OOo: flexible licensing, builds as C++, can use expat or libxml as the xml parser, support for contexts (allows named graphs), and it's mature.

There are also mature libraries in Java as well, but I'm assuming that'd be less ideal given OOo's C++ base.

So upon loading an ODF 1.2 metadata-enhanced file, OOo would just load each RDF file into an in-memory model as a subgraph, work with the data as needed using the Redland APIs, and then write it back out on save. Because of the context support, Redland can track which file to write which statements to.

So, for example, I imagine citation support would use the new generic text:meta-field and deal with two subgraphs: one for the field per se (written to "citations.rdf"), and the other for the bibliographic source metadata ("bibliography.rdf").

Anyway, just some ideas ...

Bruce

Contact

The originator of this project is David Wilson. Bruce D'Arcus of the Geography Department of Miami University is the co-project leader and metadata guru. We would be please to hear from you, also please feel free to tell the community about what interests you and what you would like to find in this project. Contact us at the users' discussion list user@bibliographic.openoffice.org or the developers' discussion list dev@bibliographic.openoffice.org