RE: Proposal: Values for UAProf properties

Hi,,

It's a pity that  UAProf seems to have lost its importance within the WAP
Forum. In Dec. 2001
it was decided to put UAProf in dormant mode which meant then that no
UAProf DC meetings
would be held anymore. The reason was that UAProf was considered final
w.r.t the WAP 2.0
specification.  Questions, comments etc, were to be directed to WAG (the
umbrella
group) which had  to decide how to act upon requests coming in via the
UAProf mailing list.
People were fine with this decision but I think the general expectation was
that UAProf would
just hibernate and could be revived if necessary. Unfortunately, today
nobody seems to feel
responsible for UAProf anymore which leaves the impression that UAProf
issues are
ignored.

To answer your question: No I don't think that UAProf is finished. It needs
further work. This
was also acknowledged in Dec. 2001 but the general feeling was that the
remaining issues
(property type system, permitted property values, profile syntax) were
CC/PP issues and thus
should be addressed by the CC/PP WG in W3C.

Indeed I tried to bring the issue of merging profiles instances of
different schemata to general
attention and sent a proposal how to solve this to the UAProf mailing list
shortly after the Dec.
2001 WAP Forum. Mark Buttler and I had a short discussion but nobody else
got involved and
no conclusion was reached ( I still have the corresponding CR sitting on my
system :-).

Regards,
Andreas Schade
IBM Research Lab


|---------+----------------------------->
|         |           "Butler, Mark"    |
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  |       To:       www-mobile@w3.org                                                                                                           |
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  |       Subject:  RE: Proposal: Values for UAProf properties                                                                                  |
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Hi Johannes, Vidhya, Nick and Tayeb

A couple of points:

> If you want to make a proposal for updating the UAProf
> specification and
> you are a member of the WAP forum, I strongly recommend that
> you make a
> Change Recommendation to the WAP forum's uaprof list
> 'wap-uaprof@mail.wapforum.org', attend a Wireless Application Group
> meeting and get it pushed through.

Unfortunately the wap-uaprof email list no longer exists. I've queried this
with the WAP Forum and comments on UAProf are now supposed to got to
WAP-WAG, although I know Nick has posted questions to this list (about the
confusion between namespace URIs and schema URLs) but has not received a
reply. Your suggestion about going to a meeting is undoubtedly a good one
though - I may need to do this at some point just to talk about CC/PP and
JSR 188. Also I have tried to submit change recommendations to the WAP
Forum
and they have never acknowledged them so I guess they have been ignored.

As for the discussion about what the schema indicates, there are clearly
differences between the schemas retrievable at the URLs and the schemas in
the WAP documentation. Another problem is the proliferation of schemas:
every UAProf phone I come across seems to use a different namespace, which
is leading to a configuration nightmare.  As IBM have noted this will also
lead to problems when you try to merge requests that used to different
versions of the uaprof vocabulary.

What can we do to avoid this? Well one idea I've had would be to create a
schema that merges the existing UAProf schemas. Where properties have
changed component, resolution rule or data type between versions these
would
either be marked as i) undefined or ii) all of the above. This schema would
then be frozen. Then if people want to add new properties, they would have
to use a new namespace and provide a schema there. I think it is much
better
to leave existing properties in the existing namespace than copy them to a
new namespace every time a new version of the vocabulary is created. This
just creates a backward compatibility problem.

So I have a question for people here: do people agree that UAProf has
reached a point where it is finished or do they think it still needs
further
work? If you do not want to make your opinion public, send it to me
directly
and I will tally the result to anonymise opinions?

thanks, best regards

Mark H. Butler, PhD
W3C CC/PP WG Chair
Research Scientist                HP Labs Bristol
mark-h_butler@hp.com
Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/

Received on Thursday, 30 May 2002 03:48:31 UTC