RE: SWAD-europe dissemination and use plan

Hi Libby et al,

(the list has public in its name, so I hope I'm right in assuming comments
from the public are acceptable here)

Good document, and some worthy aims. It got me thinking about what was
lacking at present from SW idea dissemination in Europe. So in the interests
of facilitating "... collaboration and information exchange between relevant
Semantic Web communities", I'd like to suggest the setting up of a mailing
list/forum targeted at a particular part of these (potential) communities.

The discussion on the rdf*@w3.org lists is mostly between those that are
already reasonably familiar with Semantic Web/RDF ideas, and I would suspect
that this might manifest itself to the newcomer as a kind of exclusivity.
(To some extent the W3C as whole has this kind of an aura, the WGs populated
by representatives of multinationals who meet in smoky rooms... for the
outreach to work, SWAD-E has to at least be perceived as more than a
sub-cabal of the W3C.)

I'm sure a question like "How (and why!) do I deploy Dublin Core and RSS on
my website?" would be treated well on rdf-interest, but I still think there
is need for a place where questions like "What is Dublin Core?" would not
only be tolerated but encouraged. There is a whole range of technical
information that may be too specific for rdf-interest but not specific
enough for the lists maintained by developers of particular toolkits etc.
I think its fair to say that rdf-interest is tending toward the direction of
xml-dev, where if someone asks why their Xerces parser is crashing on a '&',
they are likely to get an answer explaining why namespaces are the work of
satan.

The localisation of SWAD-E also suggests other possibilities, for example a
forum of the kind I'm suggesting would be a good place to organise meetings
& conferences that were lower key than the big events.

The key points I'd suggest for such a list would be -

* topics : Semantic Web, RDF & related technologies
* emphasis on practice
* open subscription
* any European language acceptable
* minimal formality
* unmoderated, archived, backed by faq pages (+ irc, wiki..?)

Cheers,
Danny.







---
Danny Ayers
<stuff> http://www.isacat.net </stuff>

Idea maps for the Semantic Web
http://ideagraph.net


>-----Original Message-----
>From: public-esw-request@w3.org [mailto:public-esw-request@w3.org]On
>Behalf Of Libby Miller
>Sent: 28 August 2002 10:50
>To: public-esw@w3.org
>Subject: SWAD-europe dissemination and use plan
>
>
>
>
>I've been working on this, and a rough draft is at
>
>http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/dissemination_use_plan/
>
>The plan is to send it to the commission in a weeks' time (Tuesday 3rd
>September). There's a lot of tiding to be done, but this is the basic
>structure we plan to submit.
>
>At this stage we are looking for comments and for additions,
>particularly in the sections on partner-specific internal audience
>(Section 1.1), and in the actual DUP (Section 4) where any upcoming
>conferences and other opportunities for dissemination would be useful.
>
>The document will be updated over time as we know better what
>conferences are coming up and so on.
>
>thanks
>
>Libby
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 28 August 2002 07:33:47 UTC