- From: Francois Daoust <fd@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2017 17:05:01 +0200
- To: "'SDW WG'" <public-sdw-wg@w3.org>
- Cc: "'Phil Archer'" <phila@w3.org>
Hello Working Group participants, Following discussions with Phil, Chairs and last week's F2F exchanges, we thought it would be good to make deadlines clear for everyone, especially for specifications that are to be published as W3C Recommendations (the SSN and Time ontologies). What follows is a concrete timeline to meet constraints imposed by the W3C Process. The relevants bits of the Process documents are at: https://www.w3.org/2017/Process-20170301/#candidate-rec W3C process is relatively lightweight for Notes, so the Best Practices document and the CoverageJSON document basically just need to keep that end date in mind, and aim for last publication slightly before 30 June 2017. The Spatial Data on the Web WG was granted a six-month extension until June 2017 to finalize on-going deliverables. Even if the group can demonstrate progress, it is unlikely that it can get another extension for the exact same reason after that. In other words, all documents should be done by end of June 2017. Now, we may be able to negotiate that "done" can be interpreted as "nearly done". Keep in mind that the following proposed timeline already takes that into account and actually ends after June 2017! Timeline to "almost" go to Rec by end of June 2017: 14 April - Publication of a last Working Draft ----- Prerequisites: - Most substantive issues have been addressed. A few minor ones may remain. In other words, the expectation should be that no further major substantive changes are foreseen by the WG after that draft, except in response to comments. Next for the group: - The group should publicize the work to relevant people and organizations to achieve wide review of the document. - Wide review includes horizontal reviews on accessibility, internationalization, performance, privacy, and security by relevant groups at W3C. Horizontal reviews take time, you should not expect these groups to get back to you within two weeks. Given the specifications, comments from horizontal reviews should be minimal, so hopefully we'll be able to conduct all reviews within a month timeframe. - In parallel, the group should discuss and agree on possible exit criteria for the Candidate Recommendation phase. For vocabularies, this probably means something like at least 2 independent uses of all terms with evidence of main terms being used more than that. - The group may also want to list possible features at risk (e.g. terms that could be dropped from the spec if they turn out not to be implemented) - The group should prepare a skeleton of an implementation report and assess implementation plans within the group (and/or elsewhere). 15 May - Agreement to publish a Candidate Recommendation ----- Prerequisites: - The group has addressed comments from the wide review to the satisfaction of the reviewer(s) or has recorded disagreement with a rationale somewhere. - The spec was updated accordingly. All issues that affect normative statements in the spec are closed (the group can still improve examples and other informative text afterwards) - Exit criteria are known and written in the spec. - The group knows how to gather implementation evidence to prove multiple implementations. The group can then resolves to request publication of the specification as Candidate Recommendation, which must be approved by the W3C Director. This usually takes two weeks, sometimes less. The group should start to work on filling out the implementation report in the meantime. 30 May 2017 - Publication as a Candidate Recommendation ----- Prerequisites: - The W3C Director approved the publication Per process, the Candidate Recommendation phase cannot be less than 4 weeks. During that time, the group needs to prepare the implementation report and make sure all terms are properly covered by existing implementations. The group is not allowed to make any substantive change to the specification during that time. If substantive changes are needed, the group must publish another Candidate Recommendation, which would jeopardize the timeline, so it's critical that you get things right the first time! 28 June 2017 - Request publication as Proposed Recommendation ----- Prerequisites: - No substantive change has been made to the spec since publication as Candidate Recommendation - No issue has been found with the spec that would require such a substantive change - All editorial issues have been addressed - The implementation report is ready and shows green lights everywhere - The group has resolved to publish the spec as Proposed Recommendation. What happens next is mostly out of the hands of the Working Group so, although publication as Proposed Recommendation may take place after the end of the current charter, we should be able to have the group extended long enough to handle the rest of the process and the publication of the spec as a final Recommendation. This timeline supposes that all goes well! I'm afraid there is no real way to overcome any delay that may stack up at any of these steps. In other words, mid-April should be viewed as the deadline for any substantive change in these documents. It seems doable for the Time Ontology, harder to achieve for the SSN Ontology. For what it's worth, if these specifications cannot move forward on the Recommendation track by the end of the charter, they can be still be published as Working Group Notes. Thanks, Francois.
Received on Monday, 27 March 2017 15:05:18 UTC