Mark Birbeck wrote:
Hi Bruce,
I've mentioned this here before, but more on RDF-in-OpenDocument.
<http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/10/odf-enters-semantic-web.html>
The OpenOffice project is now starting to looking into implementing it,
so people here might be interested.
I note that the attributes used in ODF are 'inspired' by RDFa [1]--but
why not just incorporate RDFa as is?
First reason is because RDFa is still not finished, published,
recommended etc. We are currently working on a XHTML 1.1 module and that
I know of there's no work in progress for a recommendation on how to
host RDFa in other XML languages. I understand that you have
ideas/vision/plans, but just like every other standards group or task
force, you can't depend on too many working drafts/vision/plan unless
deadlines are of no concern. This is a very common practice at the W3C
as well, so I hope that's enough for you to understand why we couldn't
embed RDFa as is.
Secondly, we are just getting to a point of good coverage of the issues
that surround adding metadata to XHTML, but unfortunately, although you
might see very little differences between XHTML and any other XML
vocabulary, there's a lot of things to both work out and build from
scratch in some XML vocabularies where something as basic as the
document location/hyperlink not being defined as it's the case for ODF.
I think we are too critical when we make these statements especially
when I indicated many times in our calls that I was involved in this
work and I didn't hear anyone volunteering to help. For example, several
times I went as far as asking you personally for suggestions in some
aspects of the RDFa spec before it was even brought up to the RDFa task
force for sake of progress in the ODF metadata specification.
Unfortunately, the task forces were working in parallel and it just
wasn't feasible to combine both groups, learn each others requirements
and deliver a single document. I wish things were as simple as me
saying: hey guys let's use the RDFa spec from the W3C and put an
OASIS/ODF rubber stamp on it and everyone just said: great, let's do that.
It's especailly confusing for authors when this 'inpiration' seems to
involve copying some RDFa attributes, but changing the names of
others. For example, @about is used, but @datatype has been renamed to
@data-type!
I would first hope that there's no a problem with us getting
inspiration/copying the RDFa attributes. It was a long and arduous
process to get where we are today. Bruce and I put in a LOT of time and
patience until the group passed from storming to performing.
Svante/Patrick put in an amazing effort with the documents (very similar
to what you have done with the RDFa documents). We are now a
happy/loving bunch and Bruce and I are grateful to our colleagues for
putting up enough with us to the point that they now share our vision
for metadata in office applications. It really took a lot of listening
on their part for us to share everything we thought was great about the
RDFa work. The ODF Metadata group was so much more welcoming to our
perspective as opposed to other non-SW bred groups and us arguing about
'dash' felt to me disrespectful, if not rude.
This lack of alignment is a shame, especially when the proponents of
ODF are generally critical of the confusion that can be caused by
companies and organisations pursuing alternate document formats. There
is a fantastic opportunity here for creating tools and search engines
that could leverage a 'standard' way of incorporating metadata into
HTML, XHTML, ODF, and other mark-up languages. That opportunity now
looks like it is going to be missed.
I'm not as intimate with the ODF organization, but I would not confuse
this sub-committee/task force with the rest of the organization.
Besides, I think the issues surrounding OOXML and ODF are orthogonal to
what you claim is happening in this 'divergence' of formats. Of course,
I believe that there's a fantastic opportunity here for creating tools
and blah blah into HTML, XHTML, ODF, etc. But please don't blame us for
the fact that not everyone in the world wants to adhere to our
views/technology of the Semantic Web. I think that this 'standard' way
of thinking has hurt us more than helped to reach the goal. I totally
disagree that one parser will be capable to address the issues of
metadata in ODF vs HTML. I caught myself making those arguments to later
change my mind and understand that in the end it's just code that gets
written and overwritten every other day, but a consensus to work
together as individuals and put our differences aside is much harder to
develop, no pun intended.
We were hoping to receive a warm welcome for the work we put into the
ODF Metadata for the purpose of advancing the Semantic Web, but as
always, you can't please everyone. Fortunately, I still believe ODF
Metadata + RDF/XML is making the case for extensibility, flexibility,
linked data, openness and so on, independently of whether we used the
same parser or not. We need to keep examining ourselves in the likes of
Bijan [1] so we assess what are the real problems hindering progress on
the Web by our standards and do more showing/telling and
implementation/adoption before rushing to standardizing. At least I
partially felt that way with ODF Metadata and towards the end of the
first draft, I agreed that less was better given that this was the first
introduction of RDF to the ODF world. Look at Mozilla for example and I
hope that we start small and prove the value before forcing things
without immediate benefits.
DISCLAIMER: At the risk of sounding schizo, here it goes. Mark, you know
we are cool and I'm not at all targeting everything towards you only but
to the larger community. We are colleagues, have been working together
for a while now and share a lot in common when it comes to RDFa, but I
had been meaning to reply to Bijan's email and vent a little on some of
the issues surrounding many groups/technologies on the W3C and you had
to push me over the edge :D
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2007Oct/0039.html
Regards,
Mark
[1]
<http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/25055/Metadata_22August2007.txt>
