DPUB IG Telco, 2016-06-06: Use case document & manifests

See minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions. (The headers below link into the relevant sections of the minutes.)

Use cases on manifests

Most of the meeting was on use cases to be gathered/documented on manifests. One of the most important issue, at that point, what the manifest is for an area like publishing. Is it a resource to be used for packaging only, or is it to be used independently on whether the publication is packed or not. (The consensus shifts towards the latter.) What is (is there?) a difference between the information in a manifest and what is commonly referred to as metadata?

The basic use case for manifests is to define what are the resources that are part of the publication. Then the discussion ended up listing a number of "information" that must be available about a publication; some of these are:

• information on the media type of those resources (can a RS handle them), about their size (does the RS have enough memory for it)
• reading order of the resources (at least a default reading order)
• need to know whether the rendering is offline or online
• need to have basic metadata, like the name and the cover image of the publication itself
• need to have access to the resource "efficiently", i.e., without the need to complex processing of the resource
• need to know the rights associated to resources (is it all right to download a font)
• need to know if there are extraneous files in the publication and what to do about that
• need to have information on whether the resources are unaltered, whether they can be altered and under what circumstances, about the origin of the resources

etc. (The URC document's commit right after the call has a record of that list.)

This discussion is of course ongoing. Actually, a new "virtual F2F" meeting may be organized to flesh many of the details out.