OpenDocument’s New Metadata System
The new metadata system coming in OpenDocument 1.2 was the product of the ODF metadata subcommittee. Team member and proposal co-editor Svante Schubert from Sun discusses his excitement about the opportunities this presents for OpenOffice, as well as includes a link to a recent presentation he gave on the topic at OOoCon. Rob Weir from IBM follows up with more useful links and his typically smart perspective that shows both an understanding of big picture trends and possibilities, and technical perspective one would expect of an engineer. As he says of documents:
… for those who work with thoughts, the present constraints of encoding our knowledge as simple linear strings of Unicode characters is severe. In general text is multi-layered and hyper-linked in strange and marvelous ways. Your father’s word processor and word processor format are inadequate to the task. The concept of a document as being a single storage of data that lives in a single place, entire, self-contained and complete is nearing an end. A document is a stream, a thread in space and time, connected to other documents, containing other documents, contained in other documents, in multiple layers of meaning and in multiple dimensions. What we call a traditional document is really just a snapshot in time and space, a projection into print-ready output form, of what documents will soon become.
The enhanced metadata framework in ODF, suffice to say, should provide the technical basis for developers to explore these ideas, and to provide real benefit to their users. Indeed, another of our subcommittee members was a medical doctor and semantic web geek intensely interested in the thoroughly practical—in some cases life and death—possibilities associated with metadata enhanced patient records. What if, he asks, patient records were not just dumb text, but richly layered collections of structured data?
But the metadata system will also allow for more immediate pay-off, offering what most of us believe will be a superior solution for custom functionality such as fields. For example, we have included a generic metadata field. Just a simple container for generated text, both the field and whatever data gets associated with it will get described in RDF and serialized in the file package.
Unlike Microsoft’s custom schema support, we provide this through the standard model of RDF. What this means is that implementors can provide a generic metadata API in their applications, based on an open standard, most likely just using off-the-shelf code libraries.
But beyond the pay-off for developers, this will enable users and enterprises too. The standard model enables the seamless merging of disparate data; precisely the kind of technical requirements necessary to realize the kinds of dreams Rob and John outline.
