Soliciting input for "Basic Principles for Managing an RDF vocabulary"

Among the chartered deliverables of the W3C Semantic Web
Deployment Working Group [1, 2, 3] is a best-practice
document tentatively called "Basic Principles for Managing
an RDF Vocabulary".  Starting point for this work will be
an early draft [4] produced by the former Semantic Web Best
Practice and Deployment Working Group.

The abstract of the draft says:

[[
This document articulates some basic principles of good
practice for managing an RDF vocabulary.   Following these
principles makes an RDF vocabulary "usable": new users
learn quickly how to use the vocabulary, and a relationship
of trust is built between the user community and the
vocabulary developers/maintainers.  This promotes growth
of a user community, which generates more feedback for the
developers/maintainers, leading to further improvements in
quality and usability.
]]

Principles may include: Identify your terms with URIs. Provide
readable documentation. Articulate your maintenance
policies. Identify versions. Publish a formal schema.  (The
related SWD deliverable "Best Practice Recipes for Publishing
RDF Vocabularies" [5] provides guidance on the latter.)

We would welcome input from the community on this, both through
comments on the first draft [6] and through participation in the
SWD Working Group.

Please feel free to contact the chairs for more information.

Tom Baker
also on behalf of Guus Schreiber
co-chairs of the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group

[1] SWD home page: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/
[2] SWD charter: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/swdwg-charter
[3] SWD deliverables: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/Deliverables
[4] Vocabulary principles: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/VM/principles/20050705
[5] Vocabulary recipes: http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/
[6] SWD mailing list: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/

-- 
Tom Baker - tbaker@tbaker.de - baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de

Received on Monday, 4 December 2006 18:01:32 UTC