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Authors

Nathan R. Yergler, yergler.net

With contributions from Mike Linksvayer.

Version

Latest Version: http://yergler.net/projects/cc-oasis

Status

Informational draft, subject to change.

Rights

Copyright © 2004 by the Authors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Portions of this document are based on CreativeCommons SMIL Module by Lucas Gonze, which is copyright © 2003 by the Authors. Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this document for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted in perpetuity, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph appear in all copies. The copyright holders make no representation about the suitability of the specification for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without expressed or implied warranty.

Description

This document describes the format for embedding metadata regarding a document's copyright license within the document. In particular, this document describes the method for embedding metadata in an OASIS Open Office XML file format document. As the title suggests, it originates from the Creative Commons project, but is not restricted to the licenses that they produce. Rather, it is designed to allow for the inclusion of any existing and future licenses, and to provide for the simple description thereof.

More details on this can be found on the Creative Commons site, especially the metadata specification page. Details regarding the OASIS Open Office file format can be found at the OASIS Open Office XML Format Technical Committee site. An introduction to the OASIS format was described in the Linux Journal, March 2004.

General principles

• Integrate licensing metadata with existing metadata bundled into OASIS documents.  OASIS documents are stored as zip archives, which contain the component pieces for the document.  Document metdata is stored in the meta.xml member file.  Licensing information should be embedded there.
  
• Insert license metadata as dc:rights, dc:license, and dc:rightsHolder to promote interoperability.

Implementation

OpenOffice.org is currently the most popular platform to support the OASIS file format.  OpenOffice.org provides extensive developer documentation which has been useful for developers who wish to extend and embed support for the OASIS file format and OpenOffice.org documents.  However, OpenOffice.org currently rewrites the XML contents of meta.xml when saving documents.  Therefore added metadata, such as that proposed here, does not persist between editting cycles.   In order to allow metadata to persist, a user interface must be created for entering and editting metadata.  This metadata should persist through saving and be handled appropriately when printing to PDF or exporting to HTML.

Examples

Example meta.xml document:

<!DOCTYPE office:document-meta PUBLIC "-//OpenOffice.org//DTD OfficeDocument 1.0//EN" "office.dtd">
<office:document-meta 
   xmlns:office="http://openoffice.org/2000/office" 
   xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" 
   xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" 
   xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
   xmlns:meta="http://openoffice.org/2000/meta"
   office:version="1.0">
   <office:meta>
      <meta:generator>OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 (Linux)</meta:generator>
      <!--645(Build:8693)-->
      <dc:title>CS 271 Reading Assignment 1</dc:title>
      <dc:subject>CS 271</dc:subject>
      <meta:creation-date>2004-01-15T12:42:56</meta:creation-date>
      <dc:date>2004-02-19T11:04:28</dc:date>

      <dc:rights>Copyright 2004 Nathan R. Yergler licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 license 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/</dc:rights>
      <dcterms:license>http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/</dcterms:license>
      <dcterms:rightsHolder>Nathan R. Yergler</dcterms:rightsHolder>

      <meta:print-date>2004-01-15T13:29:12</meta:print-date>
      <meta:keywords>
         <meta:keyword>computer architecture</meta:keyword>
      </meta:keywords>
      <dc:language>en-US</dc:language>
      <meta:editing-cycles>11</meta:editing-cycles>
      <meta:editing-duration>PT51M6S</meta:editing-duration>
      <meta:user-defined meta:name="Info 1"/>
      <meta:user-defined meta:name="Info 2"/>
      <meta:user-defined meta:name="Info 3"/>
      <meta:user-defined meta:name="Info 4"/>
      <meta:document-statistic meta:table-count="0" meta:image-count="0" meta:object-count="0" meta:page-count="4" meta:paragraph-count="40" meta:word-count="583" meta:character-count="3716"/>
   </office:meta>
</office:document-meta>

Further Reading

1. For cc:* elements, see http://web.resource.org/cc/schema.rdf. For text explanation of how to apply Creative Commons metadata, see http://creativecommons.org/technology/metadata/implement.
2. For discussion of the proposed dc:license and dc:rightsHolder elements, see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/dc-rights/.
3. For information on the OASIS Open Office XML file format Technical Committee, see http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office
4. For a discussion of the OpenOffice.org file format (on which OASIS Open Office XML is based), see http://books.evc-cit.info/