OpenOffice Future: XForms and Bibliographies

It seems someone at Sun has finally understood not only the as-yet-untapped possibilities opened up with OpenOffice’s XML support, but also that the bibliographic project is an excellent real world example case. To wit, a recent meeting of the OOo file format Technical Committee meeting has identified key topics of discussion for the next phase of development discussions.

The TC members have already collected some topics that might be discussed in 2nd TC phase. These topics are:
  • Security features (for instance digital signatures)
  • Form features (for instance support of XForms functionality)
  • Integration of user defined schemes
  • Enhanced bibliography features

This is very encouraging, not so much because they have explicitly recognized the need to improve bibliographic support, but because this is placed within a larger and more comprehensive solution: namely support for arbitrary schema data, and XForm interfaces.

This is big stuff, if a little late coming. It would add InfoPath-like capabilities to a widely available open source software suite!

So … let’s see.

  1. document data = XML
  2. bibliographic metadata = XML
  3. online access configuration files = XML
  4. citation formatting specification file = XML
  5. bibliographic metadata GUI specified in … XML

Very interesting indeed!

I also just learned that OOo already includes the Berkeley DB. Next step: add the XML libraries?

PS - I also love the fact the development for the file format is being done in RELAX NG!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2004 at 10:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Comment

  1. art says:
    2/2/2004 at 12:36 pm

    Maybe we are not far from:

    desktop=XML+http+WebDAV=memex

    (with apologies to Vannevar Bush) The closest I have got to this is with Mozilla’s calendar, but the world starts getting really interesting when your desktop applications start being “views” of personal content rather than silos. Ted Nelson’s notion of moving away from entrapment systems also factors in here, InfoPath may be early advantage for Microsoft but they are losing far more than they will gain by the recent attempt to get a patent for who can use content encoded in their XML formats.

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