Re: Charter Deliverables as agreed on Friday

Hi all,

Just to play devil's advocate, here are some comments.  Maybe some of  
these were answered already through the discussion Friday that I missed.

1. The deliverables are numbered D1-D9, but there is no D5.

2.   There are a lot of deliverables for 2 years: 5 recommendations  
and 3 notes.  My understanding is recommendations require a longer  
lead time and public comment period, so producing 5 recommendations  
for a 2-year process seems like a lot.

By comparison, have a look at the RDB2RDF charter/WG: it has only 5  
deliverables with 1-2 of them being recommendations, and was also  
meant to run in 2 years, and I understand that that has still been a  
slog.

3.  What is the difference between having an XML "serialization" (D6)  
vs. an OWL/RDF/etc. "formal model" (D2)?  Why do both (or either) need  
to be standardized?

4.  Why do we have both a "formal model" and "formal semantics"  
deliverable?  What is the difference, and what are the expected  
benefits of formalization?

5.  Likewise, why do D4 (accessing and querying) and D7 (mappings)  
need to be recommendations/standards, rather than notes?  I can see  
that the access issue might require some future architectural/protocol  
standardization.  But is that something that can be done by a WG  
unilaterally?  For querying and for the mappings I am not sure I  
understand the rationale for standardization.  These could perhaps be  
sub-deliverables of the "primer" or "cookbook".


Overall, the current list gives me the impression of a last-minute  
rush to include everything that might be useful.  This inclusiveness  
is good, but I worry that it might wind up overcommitting the WG or  
making the plan look too ambitious for the time available.  My feeling  
is that the fewer discrete "tasks", the better for focus and  
flexibility, since there is a start-up cost to each deliverable.

I also wonder if we can estimate how much work the different parts  
will take, and which are considered "must be recommendation" vs.  
"decide later" and "required" vs. "optional".  I understand that some  
thought about this was already done in the various WG charter drafts  
so maybe it is just a matter of transferring these to the wiki.

--James

On Nov 22, 2010, at 8:37 PM, Paul Groth wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> The deliverable list we agreed upon on Friday is now on the wiki at:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/wiki/Proposal_for_a_Working_Group_on_Provenance
>
> Thanks,
> Paul
>
>
>


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Received on Tuesday, 23 November 2010 10:29:13 UTC