Bug 008: Ingenious Tool Range

This is feedback on a Last Call Working Draft:

Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema
W3C Working Draft 10 May 2011
http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-EARL10-Schema-20110510/

Consider the following scenario. Someone writing a test report needs
to link to a particular piece of software. They don't care whether
they link to documentation of that software, or an RDF vocabulary term
for the software itself. This is kind of the difference, as in the
famous TAG finding on httpRange-14, between getting a 200 and a 303
response.

In EARL, we used to have a property for doing this. It was called
earl:tool. The idea was that the range of this property was dynamic.
If the object were documentation of a particular piece of software,
then the software itself should be understood as associated with the
present EARL assertion. If the object were a term representing the
piece of software itself, it would similarly be understand as
associated with the present EARL association.

What was really clever about this property is that it was developed
before the TAG finding. In fact it was a way to sidestep the TAG issue
altogether. But it would still have utility now, because I don't think
developers really care too much about the peccadilloes of RDF, they
just want to do the natural thing. The earl:tool property was natural,
but there is nothing like it in EARL at the moment. Something like it
should be added back.

This is more of an RFE than a bug. It is of low priority, but should
be considered as something which may enrich the language.

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Tuesday, 10 May 2011 23:02:24 UTC