[RDFTM] Guidelines: Editor's draft for review

I am pleased to announce the availability of the first draft of the Guidelines for RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability for
review by the SWBPD Working Group and the ISO Topic Maps Working Group:

   http://www.ontopia.net/work/guidelines.html
   http://www.ontopia.net/work/guidelines.pdf

The next meeting of the editors is scheduled for February 21st and we would be grateful for as much feedback as possible
before then.

The current draft is essentially complete, except for a number of issues (all clearly marked in the document), and the
section on the formal specification of the translation rules (5. Translation guidelines: formal rules). We have not yet
settled on a formalism, so we would appreciate input on (1) whether we really need one (perhaps section 3. Informal
Guidelines is sufficient), and (2) what formalism the WGs think might be appropriate.

In addition to comments on the details of the translation rules, the examples, and the general approach, we would like
feedback on whether the SWBPD thinks this document should aim to become a Recommendation or just a Note. My personal
opinion is that status as a Recommendation would do a lot to enhance the "prestige" of the Guidelines and thus encourage
wider adoption.

I would like to draw the attention of members of the OEM Task Force to section 3.6.2 N-ary relationships in particular.
As you will see, we have based our approach on the work done by Natasha, Alan and Pat in the document Defining N-ary
Relations on the Semantic Web (latest draft at
http://smi-web.stanford.edu/people/noy/nAryRelations/n-aryRelations-2nd-WD.html). It seems to us that we only need to
define a single class (which we have called rdftm:N-aryProperty, for consistency with the rest of the RDFTM Guidelines)
in order to both represent Pattern 1 (A and B) and provide the guidance necessary to achieve RDFTM interoperability. We
would appreciate your feedback on this.

The work of the editors has been taking place using the University of Bologna Wiki at
http://tesi.fabio.web.cs.unibo.it/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/RDFTM. Minutes of our conference calls are available at
http://tesi.fabio.web.cs.unibo.it/RDFTM/MinutesOfConferenceCalls.

We look forward to receiving your comments.

Finally, let me take this opportunity to apologize for my lack of active participation in the SWBPD WG during the last
months: I have been off sick for quite a while. I will try to ensure that at least one of the RDFTM editors participates
in WG telecons from now on.

Best regards,

Steve
--
Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>
Chief Strategy Officer, Ontopia
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3
Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps 1.0)