Re: status of xsd:duration in OWL (and RIF and SPARQL) - ACTION-164: RDF WG

On 7 May 2012, at 11:29, Michael Schneider wrote:

> Am 07.05.2012 00:19, schrieb Ian Horrocks:
>> Hi Bijan (et al),
>> 
>> According to my understanding, we agreed to keep the WG alive so that we could fix any OWL 2 problems caused by changes to XSD 1.1 and update the OWL 2 Rec to reference the XSD 1.1 Rec. It was also foreseen that we could take advantage of this update to fix any editorial errata in the OWL 2 Rec.
>> 
>> While I agree that the dividing line between editorial errata and substantive changes is not 100% clear, it does seem pretty obvious to me that adding support for a new datatype goes beyond the spirit of this agreement.
> 
> I agree!

But, you know, who the heck cares about the spirit of some agreement?

This is precisely the sort of procedural ridiculousness that I would have thought that the W3C would have shed after it's encounter with the WhatWG and HTML5. Procedural nicety is not an intrinsically good thing.

We're faced with a situation where OWL will be out of synch with XML Schema and potentially with SPARQL and RDF because of what is substantively an exceedingly minor change and arguably one we would have included if WXS had been finished at the time.

Really, if you don't want this change, just say you don't want this change. Oppose it substantively, not procedurally. I don't see that there's a plausible slippery slope here. It's not like we're proposing arbitrary new datatypes or otherwise unscoped changes.

(We should fix Date and Time as well.)

Now, I'm not going to make too much of it (or is that too late? :)), because there are de facto alternatives. But that's just saying that this procedure sucks and that gatekeeping by procedural nit-worshiping is a real drag on quality.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Monday, 7 May 2012 10:42:34 UTC