OpenDocument and RDF-XMP
About 18 months ago I suggested to someone on the OpenDocument TC that they look into supporting Adobe’s XMP document metadata framework, which is a nicely designed real world implementation of RDF. More recently there’s been movement on just this idea.
This is a great idea. On one hand it would enhance document metadata interoperability (with PDF documents produced with InDesign or Illustrator or LaTeX or whatever, with SVG document produced by any number of products, etc.).
On the other hand, it would also fit well with where we’re leaning (as in, we’ve not discussed it much yet and have made no decisions) at the OpenOffice bibliographic project, which is not MODS, but rather RDF; perhaps a miz of DC and PRISM. In that case, the same metadata used to represent the document proper could be used to represent embedded references (aka citations) to other documents.
Hmm …
[update: I may have spoken a little too soon on the quality of XMP, at least from an RDF standpoint. It supports only a subject of RDF, and it seems a rather poorly chosen subset at that. I hope OpenDocument TC will insist Adobe remove this arbitrary restriction.]
