Re: The way we do things in the Semantic Web community

On 25/04/12 19:44, Sandro Hawke wrote:
...

> On the other hand, please consider my point: sometimes we can't know
> whether a design will work until trying it in a fairly big arena, with a
> lot of attention.   As I understand the history, XML was designed by a
> W3C Working Group.  Has it succeeded?  Yes, sort of.  Has it failed?
> Yes, sort of, mostly when it was applied in areas not anticipated by the
> WG (like for serializing data).
 >
> Yes, we probably only get one shot with a W3C Recommendation for this,
> so we don't want to get it wrong.  But the Named Graphs paper was seven
> years ago.  I don't think sitting back and waiting for more research to
> happen is a great strategy, either.

This is a strong argument for a two strand approach:

1/ Standardize the minimal, safe ideas (tested)
2/ Layer on top the new ideas to enable usages not currently happening 
(for testing).

If (2) doesn't work out, we have at least helped by standardizing 
low-level details and so (low-level) software will be compatible. 
Boring but a step forward.

 Andy

Received on Friday, 27 April 2012 10:00:52 UTC