Bibliographic/Old Project News

News - 19th September 2006

David Wilson and Bruce D'Arcus had an IRC meeting with some of the senior OOo and Sun people about how we move forward on our plans. Peter Sefton and Matthew Dovey joined us to give third-party developer perspectives. In general we came away feeling quite good about the outcome. There is a transcript of the IRC meeting.

The most significant points of agreement, were:

1. Sun would like to help us with infrastructure.
2. They consider the new ODF metadata support Bruce is working on important (they want to implement it alongside the release of ODF 1.2 next year), and a way to address 1.
3. They are happy to discuss any API improvements we need.
4. They are happy with our proposition that it would be better to get rid of the existing DB and GUI than to try to keep it and extend it.

Point 2 is particularly important because it means senior managers and such are understanding how citations fit within a larger context (custom metadata) and that this can offer serious value-added to OOo in general. Part of what has swirled around the ODF metadata discussions is the notion of a generic field that link to metadata. This is basically what a citation is. Indeed, in the meeting Mathias Bauer asked if we could forget about the citation field and just concentrate on citations as a general metadata problem. In essence, they care about citations because it means the same infrastructure can facilitate a lot of other things that will make OOo a compelling business option.

Point 4 is also important because we don't have to fight over this, and can just focus on the best solution.

Our next steps, then, are:

1. for (Bruce D'Arcus) and the ODF metadata SC to finish our work, and make sure it gets added to OOo.
2. for us (the OOoBib project) to simultaneously take a very close look at the existing citation and bibliographic APIs and see what enhancements we need

On Point 2, it seemed manageable to identify a few strategic enhancements.

There's probably one or two more things we need to do, some of which will follow after we know more about the details above (like the citation field), but the two above are the most critical/timely.

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Contacts

Question or comments can be put to the Bibliographic Project development list dev@bibliographic.openoffice.org or to the project co-leader David Wilson.