Re: tutorial documents - follow up to portal plans (lets make tutorials instead of portals, or both, ?)

Lee pretty much preceded me with his answer...

My main point, in this respect, of the info gathering task to really see
what is already out there. Opinions seem to differ on whether there are
already enough tutorials or not out there. It is certainly the case that
there are probably more of them that I know about; it is the quality of
those that are in question, really. Before engaging into yet another
one, that is one of the issues...

There is also the issue whether we, as a group, could _agree_ on a
specific text, its general tone and content. I am not sure. An intro
material is so general, that I doubt a bit... Look at the long
discussion we had on the flyer content. It is more complicated to agree
on something like that than we anticipated...

An overview of how to use tools, which are the popular ones, etc, is
indeed an important subject. But then we get to a different, but also
sticky issue. *If* such a document was issued by a W3C group, in view of
W3C's role in this area, the world will look at such a document as an
authoritative document. This is true for all documents we produce but,
while for, say, an intro on how to pick ontologies we may still live
with this, with any document on tools we would step on the toes of
companies and tools that have a real business interest.

Finally: we do have a SW Deployment Group. Today, most of the group
concentrates on SKOS and RDFa, simply because they do not have a
manpower. But some of the topics you propose (101 ontology guide) is
clearly in their charter (they could reasonably say that if some of us
are interested doing that type of work, we should join that group and do
the work there...)

So yes, we can/should discuss this type of activities but there are
*lots* of red flags to consider as for what topic to choose and whether
we can reasonably do it. Remember Bengee's comment: too many geeks just
spoil the broth (and block the kitchen) :-)

Ivan


Lee Feigenbaum wrote:
> 
> Leo Sauermann wrote:
>>
>> Instead of doing a portal...
>>
>> So more important and doable may be that we start and initiate some
>> important tutorials:
>> * Beginners guide for the Semantic Web (giving pointers to RDF-primer,
>> cool-uris, linked data, RDFS-primer, OWL)
>> * What RDF tool to chose? (giving pointers to the most popular tools,
>> jena, sesame, 3store, how to visualize it using treehugger or fresnel,
>> etc)
>> * How to move your Web 2.0 application to the Semantic Web 2.0 (web
>> 3.0) ?
>> explaining how to embed rdf into websites, making good uris,
>> resolution, pick ontologies, giving links to 101-ontology guide,
>> linked data, etc.
> 
> Hi Leo,
> 
> It's been my understanding that the whole point of the Info Gathering
> task was that there's so much great materials out there already that
> SWEO should avoid writing new materials and instead catalog, organize,
> and present what is already out there. Also, the group has consistently
> in the past shied away from going down a road that would require us to
> anoint certain tools, tutorials, etc. as "the best" or "featured"
> (though it's been something I've been suggesting all along).
> 
> That said, perhaps we as a group have changed our mind on these things?
> 
> If that's the case, though, the materials that I'd like to see us
> generate are quite different from the ones you say. I'd like to see:
> 
> * A non-technical introduction to the Semantic Web
> * What do Semantic Web technologies bring to an enterprise? (a
> business-level overview)
> * How can existing enterprise applications, services, and data sources
> benefit from Semantic Web technologies? (more technical this one)
> 
> Now, I don't expect SWEO to actually produce all of these, but I did
> want to point out that we don't all share the same priorities as to what
> materials are most useful to educate people not already in the Semantic
> Web community. That was a large reason (I thought) that SWEO didn't set
> out to generate these sorts of tutorials in the first place.
> 
> Lee
> 
>> And once these documents have a abstract, we could invite external
>> people to write them with us
>> :-)
>>
>> what do you think?
>>
>> best
>> Leo
>>
> 

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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