Feedback to TC45
Following is the feedback I just sent to the ECMA TC45, which is overseeing Open XML.
I’ve posted my analysis of the bibliographic support outlined in the latest draft here.
In rough order or priority, I think you need:
1) to change the personal name model from first/middle/last to a more international-friendly given/family/prefix/suffix/other/sort-string.
For a specification that aspires to be an international standard, it’s simply unacceptable to be using a narrow, culturally-specific, personal name model.
The solution is simple: borrow from vCard, which is well-designed and widely-implemented, with the following name properties: given/family, honorific prefix and suffix, other, and a sort-string property to account for different sorting conventions).
2) Rationalize your type list for bibliographic sources (see my post), and allow them to be extended
3) provide rules for property extension so that developers aren’t forced into an all-or-choice of what is now a very limited model
4) ideally, you need to bring the bibliographic metadata representation in line with the metadata descriptions used for the OXML document per se, and with wider standards.
For example, you can use dc and dcterms for a lot of these properties, and in particular for critical relations (notably dcterms:isPartOf and dcterms:siVersionOf) that would make the model both more flexible and more robust. Bibliographic metadata is really not flat, and the current model imposes significant limitations that will have an impact on users and developers.
None of these changes are in any ways onerous to implement in either the spec or in software, but will significantly enhance the usefulness of the bibliographic support in OXML.
I would hope too that thinking in terms of more general metadata support can also improve other areas of the spec WRT to metadata (if, for example, you have similar problems with name models elsewhere).
