Re: ODF and semantic web

Elias Torres wrote:

> 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. 

Ah, right; forgot about that one. This was a major issue actually, as 
the ODF TC has gotten dinged in the past (say at ISO) for reusing or 
referencing unfinished specs.

...

> 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. ...

Yes, given the amount of work taking place in either traditional desktop 
  productivity applications (OpenOffice, KOffice, etc.) and the 
next-generation of web-based counterparts (Google Docs, the killer new 
Buzzword app, etc.) and that all of these I list have some level of ODF 
support, I'd think that people here would be excited about the 
possibilities this opens up. I am.

As a simple example, as I mentioned earlier, OOo is just starting to 
look into designing the implementation. There's a ton of work to do to 
fully realize the possibilities here: not just the API (which is pretty 
straightforward I'd imagine), but also things like GUIs (less 
straightforward).

The KOffice guys are also interested in implementing the support (and 
could probably benefit from connections to the Semantic Desktop work at 
KDE).

Bruce

Received on Sunday, 14 October 2007 20:44:30 UTC