-- DRAFT --

RIF Working Group Minutes

22 August 2006

Note: These minutes were taken off-line due to problems with the IRC.

For maximum readability, the comments of people who typed into the IRC have sometimes been incorporated into these off-line minutes. 

Please refer also to http://www.w3.org/2006/08/22-rif-minutes.html and http://www.w3.org/2006/08/22-rif-irc

Attendees

Present (in alphabetical order):

Hassan Ait-Kaci, Harold Boley, Francois Bry, Mike Dean, Jos De Roo,  Allen Ginsberg, Michael Kifer, Paula Lavinia Patranjan, Frank McCabe, Stella Mitchell, Leora Morgenstern, MoZ (Mohamed Zergaoui?), Igor Mozetic, Peter Patel-Schneider, Deborah Nichols, Axel Polleres, Said Tabet, Chris Welty, 1.503.317.aaaa (unidentified)

Regrets (in alphabetical order):

Jos De Bruijn, Gary Hallmark, David Hirtle, Dave Reynolds, Michael Sintek

Chair: Chris Welty

Scribe: Leora Morgenstern

Topics

1. Admin

The minutes from the July 18th meeting were approved.

The discussion of Said's minutes for the August 8, 2006 meeting was deferred, since the minutes were only sent out yesterday.

2. Liaison

Chris: need someone to do PRR liaison.

Chris discussed liasion to Fair Isaac

Chris: SPARQL is in candidate recommendation.

... This means there will be lots of discussion on SPARQL

... Hopefully this will be enough to open up lines of communication

... This (candidate recommendation) is the final step before acceptance

Sandro: After candidate recommendation, still need proposed recommendation. 

(That is, candidate recommendation is the penultimate as opposed to final step.)

Chris: Anything on SBVR?  ODM? 

No responses for ODM.

John Hall said on the IRC that with respect to SBVR, Donald Chapin has established good liaison with ISO terminology groups, and was in fact this week at an ISO workshop in Beijing.

3. Use Cases and Requirements

The discussion moved to new cases and requirements that have been proposed after the last deadline.

Chris: Deborah Nichols has moved all issues with the document into Issues Tracker

http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/track/issues/open

... This will be our official vehicle for tracking issues

... Everyone should be aware of open issues.

... Start looking at it, be ready to discuss at the meeting next week

Deborah said on the IRC that she wanted especially to discuss issues 3, 4, 9--11, and 21.

Allen: Did issues of coverage ever make it into Open Issues?

Deborah: Issues 14--16 are related to coverage. 

(Issue 14 is: Proposed Phase 2 Requirement: RIF must cover RDF;
 Issue 15 is: Proposed Phase 2 Requirement: RIF must cover OWL;
 Issue 16 is: Proposed Phase 2 Requirement: RIF should support external calls (e.g., to query processors)

... Put one sentence into document about OWL-RDF coverage.

Deborah: Would like to discuss several issues.

... Issues 9,10, and 11 seem to be directly related to editing of docuemnt. Perhaps Allen and David could take these and just do them.

(Issue 9 is: Proposed changes to Table of Contents in UCR Document;
 Issue 10 is: Structure of UCR Document, Section 3, needs improvement;
 Issue 11 is: Need to fix formatting in the UCR Working Draft)

... Issue 3: concerns XML syntax. It is just presented as a question. Who was it that raised the question? It needs to be sharpened.

(Issue 3 is: Question regarding XML syntax Requirement)

... Should it be linked to critical success factor in document?

Chris: What were we talking about when we raised  this issue (i.e., the XML question)

Sandro: Don't remember any real discussion about this. Everyone thought this was obvious --- a basic requirement.

Frank: There was a big discussion about supporting w3c and supporting take-up of the spec.

Sandro: There should be an action taken to answer this question.

Chris: The XML syntax requirement applies to widespread adoption, perhaps.

ACTION on Frank to address issue 3.
(Note: this action was never recorded in http://www.w3.org/2006/08/22-rif-minutes.html and http://www.w3.org/2006/08/22-rif)

Deborah: issue #21: 

(Issue 21 is: Proposed Phase 2 Requirement: RIF representation of XML is *XML)

... What does this mean? RIF isn't going to be translating from XML to XML as part of the spec. RIF representation of XML will be XML.

... Does that mean that XML will be part of RIF? That XML will just be used directly in RIF?

Chris: That's the idea.

Deborah: Can clean up open issues page to make this clear.

Deborah: Issues 9, 10, and 11 all seem to be document organization and formatting issues.

Chris asked Allen to take  an action to see which of these  issues can be deal with quickly.

(Note: this action was not recorded in http://www.w3.org/2006/08/22-rif-minutes.html and http://www.w3.org/2006/08/22-rif)

4. RIFRAF

Axel: With regard to the questionnaire: Actions 82 and 83 are a bit problematic. Copying the questionnaire would be a short-term solution. Every time something is changed, change must be replicated.

Sandro: Hold off until someone wants to answer the questionnaire a second time.

Action 82 is therefore droped.

Axel: Action 83 [add "no answer" to questionnaire questions] is a technical problem. There are two options: Either add N/A to comments to implement "no answer," or put a "no answer" check box in every question. The first is easier.

Chris:  Okay, the first is okay.

Chris: Said had action.

Said: Has to wait until Christiane gets back from vacation.

(This conversation may have been misrecorded, since there seems to be no record of Said having an action on the Action Tracker at http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/track/actions .
Could this have been a discussion with Hassan who in fact, does have an action (87) to write a response to Christiane's proposal?)

Chris: Frank had an action (79).

Hassan will work with Frank to merge their proposals for type discriminators. Will communicate by email. ACTION(88) on Hassan to work with Frank to augment type discriminators proposal.

Chris: As of yesterday, the questionnaire had been filled out 6-7 times.

... Do those people or Axel have comments?

Axel: Add discriminators on types of negation. But probably, I need to do a summary to clarify this on a wiki page.

ACTION on Axel to write up a wiki page clarifying the discriminators on types of negation. Due by first week of Sept.

Axel: When or how to add newly proposed discriminators, proposed by Paula?

Chris: No satisfactory discussion of this, but okay to add it to questionnaire.

ACTION (91) on Axel to add these to the questionnaire.

Axel: How to propagate evolution of questionnaire to RAF page. Who will maintain this?

Hassan: But aren't we going to review the entries to the questionnaire? And review the questionnaire in the light of what was entered?

Chris: But there are some things in questionnaire aren't on the RAF wiki page, and the wiki page is the place for explanation, rather than having too much text on the questionnaire.

Axel: proposes to analyze this by early September.

ACTION (90) on Axel to sync questionnaire back to RAF wiki page.

Hassan: Trying to come up with discriminators that relate to types; Paula is proposing new discriminators. Will these be merged? Doesn't that suggest that early Sept. is too early?

Alex: Refers to his previous emails on Mozilla XUL Templates Rules Language. 
Would like to fill out questionnaire for this and JBOSS.

(Problem is the technical issue of filling out a questionnaire twice.)

Chris: What are the technical issues involved in filling out the questionnaire twice?

Axel: The problem is that it's a one-to-one relation. 

Chris: Alex, email the answers to the questionnaire to me; then I will have someone else fill it out.

ACTION (89) on Alex to fill out questionnaire for both XUL and JBOSS and email it to Chris. 

Axel: It might be possible to just send all questionnaires to me by email; then I could easily handle multiple answers by an individual.

Sandro: It's nice, though, to have the data available to everyone --- people can look at it; it may be possible to run some analysis on it; etc.

5. Technical Design

Chris: Action review. One action (Peter's) is due soon, but none are due yet.

... Any discussion on technical design? 

No responses.

6. AOB

Chris: Any discussion on AOB?

No responses.

Chris proposed to adjourn.  The proposal was seconded by Paula and Hassan, and the meeting was adjourned.