Hi Michael,
I still don't really get which features related to RDF, you would like to see in Scribus.
But I have to admit that I don't really get yet, what exactly is the Resource Description Framework in our context and how it can be used in text documents.
You might want to provide example of what you plan to do with it.
(Of course, I get why having a standard for defining a tree of properties and values is very useful.)
From the screenshots and slides you linked to, I guess that Scribus needs a good way (ok, theoretically, a better way...) to show properties attached to text.
We have limited support for bookmarks and references, but they are not implemented in a good way and the user interface is not comfortable.
From my point of view, if I somehow understood correctly your goal, I would approach the issue by first implementing from scratch HTTP links.
I think that this is the simplest thing that looks like an RDF resource (but has a much smaller scope).
The issues to be solved are:
- How to display the URLs in the document
- How to let the Scribus user edit the values attached to each URL
- How to add the URLs in document intended for print and how to do it in the case of Web distribution.
I think that we would need to already know what the exact scope of the RDF support in Scribus needs to be, to make sure that the implementation can scale to support your RDF requirements.
Another requirement that should be taken into consideration: in the future, the link should also work inside of the PDF document (as an example for the TOC). But this part does not need to be implemented yet (if it's not useful for RDF).
Without doing this preparation work, and without exact requirements on what needs to be supported, it's very hard to say how much effort is needed.
So, instead of thinking about how much time it will be to implement the feature, I think that it would be more suitable to define a maximal effort to do an explorative work.
On the other side, I've not yet had the chance to work on the ODT import code, but from what I've seen, it's one of the nicest part of the Scribus code base.
And the ODT format also looks very clean.
And if the PDF has a way to store those value, that part should not be hard, either.
Sorry, that I can't give you more precise information.