RE: www-rdf-calendar list goals (and msg tone)

On Thu, 31 May 2001, Charles F. Munat wrote:

> Dan's post clarifies things a great deal. From what I'd read on the list, I
> was under the impression that there was a goal beyond simply airing ideas.
> That explains much of my confusion.

While this is a fine place to air ideas, it's also a fine place to set
and achieve goals. I just wanted to stress that we were not engaged in
'recommendation track' work on a W3C specification. Since we're all rather
busy, I don't expect people to get too excited about sitting on yet
another "talking shop" mailing list. With www-rdf-calendar we've got a lot
of the right people together on a public archived mailing list, and I hope
to take advantage of this. Many of use are building RDF and/or calendar
systems _anyway_. We have a lot of autonomy here; the goals we set will
need to be goals that we want to meet. In that light it seems sensible
(as Libby has suggested) to focus on comparing implementations and schema
proposals. To avoid tediously re-living discussions that have happened
before on the iCalendar list, it seems right to take that work as our
starting point.  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-calendar/2001May/0019.html


> Now, having said that, I'm wondering, What *is* left for the W3C to do re
> calendaring?

The message I've just cross-posted from the RSS-DEV list shows that there
is real developer interest in having some simple common vocabulary for
syndicating event description. (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-calendar/2001May/0040.html)

This list, as an RDF Interest Group forum, is part of W3C's Semantic Web
activity, http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ and we might (after some
implementation experience) decide that one concrete goal of the group is
the authoring of a document that W3C might publish as an informational
Note. The distinction between a W3C Note and a W3C Recommendation spec may
be an obscure one, so I'll outline the difference briefly. A
"Recommendation track" spec is a pretty serious effort, conducted by a
formal W3C Working Group, and governed by a fair amount of formal process.
A W3C Note is another option for publishing techniques, ideas and
proposals to the Web community. W3C's Tech Reports page,
http://www.w3.org/TR/ contains a listing of TRs including Notes and
Recommendations, alongside various other documents on the 'rec' track.

The W3C Process document goes into a lot more detail on all this.
Excerpting from
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process-20010208/tr.html#Reports
	[[
	A W3C Note is a dated, public record of an idea, comment, or document.
	Notes are published at the discretion of the Director. Authorship of a
             Note may vary greatly (e.g., by the Team, by a W3C Working
	Group, by a W3C Member, etc.). Some examples of when W3C publishes a Note
             include:
                 Documents that are part of an acknowledged Member
	Submission request. Members wishing to have ideas that are developed
	outside
                 of W3C Activities published at the W3C site as a Note
	must follow the Submission process.
                 Informative resources produced by a Working Group or the
	Team.
	]]



So one option before us would be to work up proposals for a Note
describing a technique for representing events in RDF/XML. The RSS
application alone suggests that the wider community would find some value
in such a piece of work. That said, at this stage I don't see any great
urgency to do this as a 'Note'. To have a simple clear exposition of such
a technique written up _anywhere_ would be pretty useful. I did want to
mention that publishing a Note describing such a technique (or techniques)
would be one possibility.

Another more immediate goal already mentioned by Libby is nailing down
some of the schema proposals that are floating around. We have Jonas' doc
(is this final, complete?), and now the RSS proposed module. Let's focus
on getting these proposals written down and implemented by Libby's
end-of-july deadline, then take stock.

danbri

Received on Thursday, 31 May 2001 05:12:20 UTC