The following is a brief summary of a talk I gave recently at the Ingenta Publisher Forum on the 28th November. The slides are available as a Powerpoint presentation.
In the presentation I tried to highlight some of the possibilities that could become available if academic publishers begin to share more metadata about the content they publish, ideally by engaging with the scientific community to expose “raw” data and results.
This is the second part of my look at XMP. This time I’m focusing on the potential for using XMP as the metadata format for OpenDocument (ODF).
This is part of a broader discussion to help define the future direction for the ODF metadata format, one proposal on the table is to use RDF, via a constrained RDF/XML syntax. There’s a wiki available for discussing this issue, particularly how to map existing metadata to RDF.
At least some of the impetus for exploring richer metadata support has come from the bibliographic sub-project which aims to build-in support for bibliography management into OpenOffice 3.0.
RDF is a good fit for the flexible storage and formatting requirements that arise from bibliographic metadata. As XMP is an RDF profile its worthy of consideration, and in fact this is the proposal behind Alan Lilich’s posting to the OpenDocument TC member list. Lilich’s discussion document frames the rest of this posting.
I’ve been taking a look at XMP as I’ve been considering different ways to “enrich” content. Embedding metadata is one option and XMP aims to fulfill the role of a metadata format suitable for embedding in a diverse range of media formats.
It’s also under discussion as way to embed metadata in the OpenDocument format. The alternatives available in that quarter have been under discussion in various circles for some time. Bruce D’Arcus points to the latest entry to that discussion in his recent “OpenDocument and XMP” posting.
I thought I’d write up some notes on XMP in general and contribute some thoughts towards that debate. This is the first of two postings on this topic.
