Re: [office] RDF support?

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Michael,

Thanks!

Sorry to hear no one is working on fuller support for RDF in LibreOffice.

Considering the difficulty, expense and uncertainty of creating metadata 
post-authoring, I would think that enabling users to select an RDF 
"library" that automatically annotates their authored content with RDF 
metadata that can be validated by the author would be a "killer" feature.

Since I tend to write mostly about metadata, topic maps, etc., the RDF 
library I would use would be quite different from someone who was 
writing about sports.

There would remain the issue of building the RDF libraries, but I 
suspect that would be a market driven activity.

Think of adding RDF metadata by the author as addressing the information 
entropy problem, which is larger ignored with current data mining and 
big data techniques.

Oh, information entropy problem: You can't get more information out of a 
document than was put into it.

Yes, people try to impute information to terms (parts of speech, etc.) 
but that's post-authoring. For semantics you are much better off asking 
the author.

Or as I said to Svante once upon a time, having ontology-check much as 
we have spell-check now.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

On 10/12/2015 04:25 PM, Michael Stahl wrote:
> On 12.10.2015 15:32, Jos van den Oever wrote:
> > On Saturday 10 October 2015 21:03:17 Patrick Durusau wrote:
> > > Greetings!
> > >
> > > Is RDF support on the roadmap for any of the implementers of ODF?
> > >
> > > Despite my misgivings about RDF, it would clearly be superior to current
> > > metadata support in office software in general.
> > >
> > > Not that I think we need to make changes but if we could encourage such
> > > support sooner rather than later, it could make a selling point for ODF.
> > Calligra has RDF support and even a built-in sparql engine. It is not used
> > widely I think.
> > LibreOffice has support for loading and saving. I do not know if there is an API
> > for accessing and changing the metadata.
> yes there is:
>
> https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/OfficeDev/RDF_metadata
>
> in summary we have in Writer xml:id support on the most important
> elements, support for text:meta and text:meta-field elements, plus a
> generic  RDF API for extensions/macros with an in-memory RDF store and
> ODF import/export for all that.
>
> the most important missing feature is copy/paste: when some content
> element is copied, the copy/paste of the RDF metadata referencing that
> element via its xml:id is left completely unspecified by ODF, which is
> unlikely to yield similar results in different implementations.  (the
> problem is that the RDF graphs have arbitrary connections and have no
> "natural hierarchy" (they are not trees), and of course by the very
> nature of the feature ODF implementations cannot assume particular
> semantics of the RDF properties that happen to be used in some file.)
>
> there is also no UI for RDF metadata, but that is sort of intentional:
> the feature is mostly intended to be used by extensions.
>
> unfortunately currently nobody is working on it.

--
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Technical Advisory Board, OASIS (TAB)
OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
Twitter: patrickDurusau