Re: Proposed response for timbl-02 (reification semantics)

At 13:41 09/04/2003 +0100, Brian McBride wrote:
>Graham,
>
>This looks fine, with a couple of caveats.
>
>I note from Tim
>
>[[
>As Director, I wonder about whether the group can claim this part of
>the spec to have reached its implementation requirement,
>if the parsers parse the information but the semantics have not been
>field tested.
>]]
>
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2003Apr/0137.html

I thought that was addressed by the uses we had identified...

>We had three folks say at the telecon that they used reification as 
>defined.  Mike has written his up.  I recall that Patrick and Frank were 
>the others.  We also have the p3p rdf schema.  I suggest we also ask 
>Patrick and Frank to say document their use cases on the record so we can 
>point to them from the WG response.
>
>Patrick, Frank - you ok with that?

I didn't catch that Frank was using this.  That would be four users known 
to us.

>That would still leaves Tim's point
>
>[[
>(Remember the story of the man who wrote make(1) and a few
>days later realized that the tab/space distinction in the Makefile
>syntax was a mess, but didn't like to change it because by that time
>several of his colleagues were using the syntax?)
>]]
>
>which I read as saying that for the long term good of the semantic web we 
>should ignore the short term pain.  Tim will have the option of coming 
>back and saying that, but we will at least have differentiated between 
>there being no use (which is what I think Tim might believe) and not 
>enough use.

That's for the working group to decide.  My action was to draft a response 
based on the decision we made.  (So far, we've decided that pain/confusion 
of keeping it is not so great...  it's not as if we've only had "a few 
days" to think about it.  Also, it appears that the R-vocabulary is useful, 
but not for what Tim wants to do.  It doesn't feel like a corresponding 
situation to me.)

>Also, I think we agreed to put health warnings on semantics and schema so 
>that folks were aware of what reification isn't appropriate for.

I guess I should add that to the response?

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>
PGP: 0FAA 69FF C083 000B A2E9  A131 01B9 1C7A DBCA CB5E

Received on Wednesday, 9 April 2003 13:02:36 UTC