Metadata and the Semantic Web

Today I've got an automated e-mail from a software called "Link Manager", telling me that a hyperlink inside one of the books I've published on docs.sun.com isn't valid any more and should be replaced or removed.

This is a nice and welcome service, provided by an external (external to my book text) program. I had to register the book right before publishing, so the Link Manager software did know about the book and the hyperlinks within the text.

Now, there are millions of text documents, online and offline, published on the web or in an intranet, or not published at all, and they all contain information that needs to be kept up to date. Wouldn't it be good to have a type of Link Manager service built into every document? A function that automatically cares for all the information inside your text documents?

How often did you think, while writing a paragraph: "This reference certainly will expire some day, so I must come back here regularly and have a look."

Or you might have a comparison chart with data that will be different in some years, still you want to publish the chart now and not be forced to update it manually ever so often.

And the "Link Manager" service can be valuable far beyond caring for hyperlinks. How often do you write a paragraph and think: "Here I must ask person ABC if this is really right, and there I will insert an image of XYZ as soon as I get one that is free to use", and so on.

Currently, you can insert a note into your text, but this doesn't look good, and it is of no big help if your documents contain many thousand notes. What we need is a method of attaching additional structured information to any text. Information that is visible to tools software, or by request of the user, but that is normally hidden from the human reader.

For a hyperlink in your text, you would need additional information about date and time of insertion, date and time of next validation, may be alternative link to be used in case the original expired, source of the information, may be copyright information and license, author contact information, and much more.

With all these information, it would be possible to have some software tool scanning your documents regularly, checking if everything is OK, changing what is allowed to be changed automatically, or reporting problems to your attention.

Of course, those methods only work on open standard formatted documents, as ODF, and the meta data must be attached following an open standard, too.

Fortunately, such open standards exist. The meta data format is proposed by OASIS.

If you are into technical writing, publishing documentations, you will need standardized metadata in your documents. Every document should have a feedback link, and creation data, page count, copyright information, and more. In Writer, just click Tools > Bibliography Database to see how you can input and edit metadata today. The method used in OpenOffice.org to link to the bibliography database was just a very first step, using proven and available technology, on the road to real RDF metadata. Entering and editing metadata will certainly be more comfortable later.

Many software visionaries and engineers are working on metadata standards, for example using Dublin Core technology, or other developments as in SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System).

The OpenOffice.org software is already prepared for meta data, see the Blog entry by Svante Schubert and the presentation he held at the OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 in Barcelona.

So, OpenOffice.org is prepared to handle meta data in open standard documents, as proposed in the RDF specification.

As you can see from the comments to Svante's blog, the meta data support is a hot topic. Be prepared to meet some dragons here.

This is because there is enormous potential with metadata. Clever designed metadata can transform your text documents, spreadsheets, presentations into almost everything. Using metadata and special metadata aware hardware and software, your web based documents can be used to automate almost every aspect of your reader's life. The automatic programming of video recorders is just the least intrusive effect. A multitude of services can be developed to build upon the metadata, and the financial aspects might look like the next virtual gold rush.

Time will tell. Click the Semantic Web logo to read more about the future of the web.

A nice magazine article by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor of the World Wide Web", and others is here. By the way, that old magazine text shows the need of more intelligent link managers: It names an URL of a web page that contains some meta tags, but if you browse to that URL, you find that this page meanwhile got changed by its owner. It's a pity: The owner had no metadata tag sticked automatically onto his web page reminding him that the URL is used in an example about meta tags. In a perfect world, he would have registered his web page to a metadata maintaining service that would have told him that another registered web page links to this web page.

And be happy that your ODF documents will not become outdated. ODF is an open standard, a good citizen of the World Wide Web.

Some documents can be brushed up by pasting sticky notes on the pages. You can create some nice notes in OpenOffice.org without much effort. Save them in the Gallery, and then later you can easily position them to any place on your pages.

Create a container for the sticky notes:

1. Open the Gallery. It's in Tools > Gallery.

2. Click New Theme... button to create a new theme. Name it "Sticky Notes" for example.

Create some notes:

1. In Writer, click the Show Draw Functions icon on the Standard toolbar.

   The Drawing toolbar opens next to the bottom of the window.

2. Click the Text icon (with the letter T on it). Then drag a rectangle on the page.

3. Enter some text to keep the text box visible. You are in text edit mode now.

4. Click outside the text box to leave text edit mode.

5. Click the text once. Now the text box is selected as an object. You see eight handles to move and scale the text box.

6. Right-click inside the text box to open the context menu.

7. Choose Area to edit the area properties. For example, you can apply a solid yellow color, or a color gradient.

You can also apply a shadow and transparency to the area and the shadow.

Choose the Line command in the context menu to set the border properties.

Choose the Text command in the context menu to define some spacing between text and borders.

Click outside the text box to leave the selected object.

Double-click the text to edit the text.

Store the sticky note in the Gallery:

Use drag-and-drop to copy the text box into the Gallery. This can be a little bit tricky.

1. First you must click the text box to see the eight handles. When you see the handles you know that the object is selected.

2. When you just click and drag the object, it will not leave the document's pages. So you must click the text box and hold down the mouse button for a second or two without moving the mouse. Then, without letting go of the mouse button, start moving the mouse to the Gallery.
   

3. Now you can release the mouse button to drop the text box into the current theme folder of the Gallery.

Apply a sticky note from the Gallery:

1. With any document open, open the Gallery. Open the Sticky Notes theme.

2. Drag-and-drop a text box (also known as a sticky note now) from the Gallery into the document. No need to wait a second when you drag from the Gallery.

3. Double-click the text box to edit the text. Select the text and choose Format > Character to change the text color or other character properties.

By default, the text box is anchored to the paragraph where you dropped it. You can move the text box to another paragraph, and the anchor will follow. You can also change the text box anchoring to be anchored to the page, or to a character. See the Help for more information about anchors.

If you have read and write access to a server on the Internet, you can open and save your files directly using OpenOffice.org (OOo). The following protocols are available to transfer your files:

• FTP

• HTTP

• HTTPS (starting with OOo 2.4)

Using OOo file dialogs

To transfer files using Internet protocols, you must use the OOo file dialogs to open and save your documents.

Choose "Tools - Options - OOo - General" and enable the "Use OOo dialogs" checkbox.

Opening a file from the Internet

Now you can choose "File - Open" or press Ctrl+O and enter the full name of any file that OOo can open. Don't forget to enter the protocol at the beginning of the name.

To open the ODF text document "mydocument.odt" which resides on the server www.myserver.com in the folder myfolder, you can enter the following text as a file name:

http://www.myserver.com/myfolder/mydocument.odt

This is only a hypothetical example to illustrate the syntax - do not enter that server name now as it might exist in real life.

You can also start the full name with ftp:// instead of http:// in case there is an FTP server running at the other end.

Secure file transfer

Starting with OpenOffice.org 2.4 you can also use the secure https:// protocol. This secure protocol requires an authentication by name and password.

As you may want to connect to multiple servers using a different name and password each, we introduced a kind of identity management system which allows you to setup a master password. You may already know this from your Firefox web browser. This new master password feature can be found on the redesigned OOo 2.4 "Tools - Options - OOo - Security" dialog.

Using a proxy server

Some Internet service providers may ask you to enter a proxy server. You can enter proxy server addresses and port numbers by "Tools - Options - Internet - Proxy".

Saving to the Internet

When you open a document using an Internet protocol, that document is downloaded to a temporary folder on your local drive. You can edit the document as you like and save it to any other folder on your local drive.

If you have write permission to the web server, you can also use the OOo file save dialog to save the document to the server. You must enter the full name including the protocol to save the document directly to the Internet server. If you just press Ctrl+S you would only update the temporary file on your local drive.

Using the OOo file dialogs, you can easily work with documents stored on an Internet server. This allows you to use Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) as a working environment with OpenOffice.org.

This extension to Firefox is located at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4102

The submenus offer many useful links to OpenOffice.org web sites, as well as other related links.

And the OOo menu command clearly signals to everyone that you belong to the Friends Of OOo!

Most users of OpenOffice.org already know that it is easy to change all icons at once, to find a totally new look of their Office. Only few StarOffice users know that they can enjoy an all new icon theme, too.

In OOo, you choose Tools - Options - OOo - View. Here you can select another Icon Style from a list box. Click OK, and you see the new icons immediately.

The supplied icon sets may be different for different distributions of OOo. In my version, I can select from the default set, Industrial, HiContrast, and Crystal.

I like the large icons of the Crystal set, so I want to see those icons in my installation of StarOffice, too.

Unfortunately, StarOffice does not offer the Icon Style list box. There may be a reason for this decision, but there don't seem to be any technical barriers to use an OOo icon set for StarOffice. You can even use a different icon set for every user on a network installation. This is how to proceed - but be careful, this is not an official method but more of a "hack":

1. Get the images_crystal.zip file from an OOo installation. The images*.zip files are stored in the {OOo_installation}/share/config folder.
2. Copy the file to your {StarOffice8_userfiles}/user/config folder. On Linux systems, this is ~/.staroffice8/user/config. On Windows systems, this is something like C:\Documents and Settings\your_username\Application Data\StarOffice8\user\config.
3. Rename the copied file to images.zip
4. Restart StarOffice 8 to see the new icons. You may want to select the "large" icon size in Tools - Options - StarOffice - View.

As a StarOffice user, I want to thank all OOo icon artists for their great work that they contribute to the community!

Blogging Made Easy With OOo

Finally, the new blogging extension for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org is available. Browse to the Sun Store at http://globalspecials.sun.com/ and click the link or go direct to this page.

Sun Weblog Publisher

From the Sun Store, after some handshake protocol involving a money transfer, you'll get a file with the *.pkg file name extension. Installation is easy using the menu Tools - Package Manager. (Starting with OOo 2.1 this is called Extension Manager.)

Once installed, you will notice a new menu entry Weblog and a new toolbar.

Add your Blog site and access info on the settings dialog.

Write your Blog as a normal OOo Writer document, include some formatting and pictures, and click the Send to Weblog icon.

Now formatting your Blog is as easy as in Writer. Include pictures. Use the spellchecker.

You can retrieve your existing blog entries, edit them in Writer and then upload with a single click.

A first tip: Choose View - Toolbars - Hyperlink Bar to view and edit the hyperlinks in your blog.