GRDDL spec review

In the last telecon, I took an action to review the GRDDL spec[1] and
flag any potential issues w.r.t. SWD deliverables. Please read my
comments below, so we can discuss them in our next telecon. Also please
note that I just reviewed the spec (not the Primer nor the test cases).

Executive summary: I don't see any conflict between GRDDL spec and SWD
Deliverables. Go ahead and publish!

Long review:

* GRDDL and SKOS: I cannot see any obvious connection between these
technologies (with the exception of SKOS being one of the candidate
formats to capture the output of GRDDL transformations). The GRDDL spec
makes no reference to SKOS, and I think that's just fine.

* GRDDL and Recipes: the first paragraph of section 3 of the GRDDL spec
suggests[2] the use of content negotiation to publish different
representations (XML Schema / RDF Schema) of a namespace document. It
also links the definition of "content negotiation" in the WebArch
REC[3], however it makes no reference to the Recipes. I see a connection
here, but I don't think it's strong enough to justify a reference to the
Recipes, considering that content negotiation is just a side-question
that appears in the context of an example. So I suggest no change here.

* GRDDL and Vocabulary Management: there is also a connection between
the concern with avoiding the overload of webservers serving namespace
documents (which might be expressed as vocabularies in RDF Schema) and
the versioning of such documents, because the proposed solution is to
implement some kind of cache, and "GRDDL-aware agents should ensure that
this local memory is up to date [...]". However, an example later in the
document (section 7) illustrates the usage of HTTP headers to ensure
this, which is a simpler, widely-accepted and already available
solution. Therefore, I think it makes no sense to apply RDF versioning
to solve this problem.

* GRDDL and Semantic Integration: I think they're not related.

* GRDDL and RDFa: RDFa appears once in the spec, and it happens when
introducing the Use Cases companion document. That document contains
lots of references to RDFa, but it's out of the scope of this review.
With respect to the spec, I kindly suggest to emphatise the
complementarity with RDFa, maybe with a paragraph similar to the one
that already exists for XProc.

In addition to these comments, I would like to raise some really minor
editorial issues that have no relation with this WG activity, so I'll
send them directly to public-grddl-comments.

Best regards,

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/#ns-bind
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#def-coneg

-- 
Diego Berrueta
R&D Department  -  CTIC Foundation
E-mail: diego.berrueta@fundacionctic.org
Phone: +34 984 29 12 12
Parque Científico Tecnológico Gijón-Asturias-Spain
www.fundacionctic.org

Received on Friday, 20 April 2007 08:43:40 UTC