citations, fields and metadata

Apropos of the metadata discussion, I had an action item to determine 
what to do with the already approved citation field.

<http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/XML-bibliography-proposal.pdf>

My conclusion is that we drop it in favor of the generic new 
text:meta-field.

Explanation is below, in a response I sent to one of the OOo dev lists.

Clearly we will need to discuss this as part of the broader metadata 
discussion.

Bruce

Begin forwarded message:

> Date: June 8, 2007 7:38:01 AM EDT
> To: 
> Subject: Re: [sw-discussion] Word fields
>
> Hi Mathias,
>
> On Jun 8, 2007, at 6:42 AM, Mathias Bauer wrote:
>
>> I thought that's what we have already agreed upon,
>
> Just wanted to be sure, since things have evolved since our previous 
> discussions :-)
>
> I also wanted to make clear that text:meta-field can solve some of 
> these interoperability problems.
>
>> moreover my impression was that besides the general meta-field stuff 
>> there will be
>> an explicit support for citations.
>
> It depends what you mean by "explicit support for citations." If you 
> mean in code, then sure.
>
> If, OTOH, you are talking about the ODF citation field Daniel 
> Vogelheim and I designed, then no.
>
> In talking about this with the metadata subcommittee, we have come to 
> the conclusion this is not a good idea. The text:meta-field is 
> sufficient to implement robust citation support, and introducing 
> another field for that means it is less likely to be supported in 
> different ODF implementations.
>
> This is already a problem with the existing bibliographic support, 
> where AFAIK, only OOo supports it. KOffice apparently just throws out 
> the fields IIRC.
>
> With text:meta-field, we have a very high likelihood of it being 
> widely implemented, at least for display.
>
> As for the potential issue of a lack of standard approach to doing 
> citations, we have discussed the idea for the TC to issue informative 
> notes of sorts that demonstrate best practice for a given use case. 
> So, for example, we would issue one for citations. If it needed to be 
> folded into the ODF spec proper later, that could happen too. That 
> gives the flexibility of the generic field and metadata support, but 
> also guidelines for smooth interoperability.
>
> This is my current understanding. The TC will be discussing the 
> metadata proposal starting on Monday, and I have told them we will 
> discuss the citation use case as a part of that discussion. So we'll 
> resolve it for sure then.
>
> Bruce