More on OpenDocument and RDF
The OpenDocument TC is in ongoing discussion about using RDF for metadata. To wit, Duane Nickull from Adobe posted a draft of a proposal, and Florian Reuter from Sun posted some slides that give some more context.
Duane’s proposal would handle links between (non-RDF) XML document content and its RDF referent by means of XML id/idref links. I’m not that familiar with the technical intricacies here, but this feels like a not quite-ideal approach. Also, I’m not thrilled that some rather arbitrary restrictions from the XMP spec (like that metadata must be wrapped in an rdf:RDF element, despite the fact the current RDF spec has no such limitation) have ended up in the draft proposal.
Nevertheless, I’m glad to see this on the agenda with the OD group, and that they’re taking RDF seriously. My experience working with this group on the citation proposal was nothing but positive, so I expect good things to come of this.
