WOWG: Calendar issues

After today's telecon adjourned we had a short discussion about 
schedule for the working group. Since there was no log of this 
meeting, I am sending the following summary of the discussion - I ask 
those who attended to feel free to correct me if my recollections are 
wrong:

1)  We concluded that our documents were roughly in the following shape:

Guide and Use Cases are ready to go - modulo any changed caused by later work

Overview and References need reviewing and polishing, but there is 
reason to believe they are converging to a publishable shape

Semantics and Test need work - this is not in any way a reflection on 
their editors (who have all been doing incredible amounts of work), 
but on the fact that for the first time we've really probed the 
technical details down to the lowest level, and now need to make some 
final decisions and then create appropriate test cases

2) Pretty much all participants agreed that we could not take a very 
long time on this level, but that we needed more than a week to solve 
them.  We are not yet ready to say how long, but "steam rolling" 
rather than dealing with the "issues" seems like a bad idea

3) Jeremy will prepare a list of what he thinks are critical issues 
for the WG to discuss, and try to prioritize them.  Peter will 
respond (when he can) and best tell us which ones he think cause real 
problems, which ones are ok, which ones are ugly but he could live 
with.

4) these discussions will not all be on the WG archive, but will be 
archived at www-archives and all of us will get a chance to comment 
once there a list of a few issues

5) the chairs will keep a strict watch on this, and make sure we keep 
moving -- we will try to be tough about not reopening old decisions 
unless there is reason to do so, at the same time we will be willing 
to reopen issues, or rapidly create new "mini issues" when needed to 
reach consensus on this.

6) We will aim for end of February  (chairs note: if not sooner), for 
LC release - but we are not setting specific dates because we need to 
really determine what is left to do in this "engineering fix" stage.

7) During this period I, and I hope some other members of the group, 
will work on implementation and aspects relating to moving from CR to 
PR, so we hope we can have a shorter LC period, and more confidence 
of skipping CR, while we spend the time working these final issues.  [
[note: particularly needed are implementations of Lite and DL 
reasoners that can handle our test sets and be actual OWL, rather 
than DAML or OIL or other syntax, systems - this could include 
building mappers in the syntax and then just using existing systems]]

Again, the above are my best recollection notes, and my plans as 
chair for getting us done without too long a delay.

My own note:  I still worry that delay adds risk w/respect to 
adoption and AC politics - however, so does a bad design - we must 
work hard as a WG to find the right balance between these.

  -Jim H.
p.s. I cc the W3C Semantic Web Coordination Group so they can be 
aware of this scheduling change and our current best guess plans.
-- 


Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Thursday, 23 January 2003 21:19:30 UTC