Re: Requirements for a possible "RDF 2.0"

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 9:50 AM, Dave Reynolds
<dave.e.reynolds@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Chris Welty wrote:
>>
>>
>> Without volunteering myself to be such a contact, I have (as both a users
>> of many RDF implementations and a W3C chair and I suppose a self-declared
>> semantic web expert) been the recipient of a lot of complaints and
>> suggestions regarding the design and implementation of RDF, and at ISWC a
>> few months ago I suggested to Ivan that we start discussing starting a
>> working group that would investigate a next version of RDF.
>>
>> This discussion is happening in several places already, and we thought
>> this was the best place to house that discussion for now.
>>
>> A workshop on this subject is also in the planning, more news on that in a
>> week or two.
>>
>> I suppose we don't really need to discuss whether we should investigate an
>> "RDF 2.0", but rather what kinds of requirements various RDF users have that
>> they would like to be considered (I'd like this thread to be less "+1" and
>> "-1" messages, and more "I'd like to see RDF support x...")
>
> Hmm. There are lots of aspects of RDF that could be cleaned up or improved
> but it is not clear to me that any of them are major impediments to using it
> at this stage. Having a working group fiddling with the foundations is not
> necessarily a good thing.
>
> I'd rather see answers to a question like "this class of applications is
> being seriously held up by lack of X/problem Y". I.e. more requirements than
> wish list.

Yes, I said much the same in my original offlist response. RDF rollout
is not where it should be after 13 years, and I doubt the lack of
improved-and-changed specs is to blame. My inclination is to go
against W3C's natural instinct, which is to assume the answer to most
'what shall we do?' questions is something like '... make more
specs.'. I don't think the answer is more evangelism either; plenty of
people have been evangelised into checking out RDF, only to be
dissapointed. My instinct is that the problem is a combination of
avoidable difficulties (tooling maturity, helpful documentation) and
harder-to-avoid difficulties, ie. that the whole approach of RDF has
some intrinsically difficult aspects, such as the chaotic, gappy and
arbitrarily extensible nature of the data model.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Thursday, 14 January 2010 08:59:25 UTC