A way forward

I have really got to get back to my day job for a while. But I'm so
frustrated with how things are going that I wrote a wiki page.

http://esw.w3.org/topic/AwwswVocabulary

My new thoughts are:
- Let's start actually working on ontology, not just terms, and try to
surface our disagreements formally using OWL (not a new idea but we've
lacked a process for doing this, and I'm suggesting one)
- But use prose (term requests) as a stepping stone toward OWL so we
can separately wrangle the ideas and encode them (i.e. I have OWL
swapped out but still want to do this)
- Without constraints (domain, range, subclass, disjoint,
restrictions, etc.) we only have a concept map (thanks Pat), which is
useless
- Let's forget about the *syntax* of requests and responses and
instead focus on their *meaning* under various regimes (thought
experiment: a compiler that translates statements (about a resource)
expressed using HTTP into statements expressed using RDF - how the
parser works is an uninteresting internal detail)
- Failure to respect the protocol should be detectable as a logical
contradiction (pointing the way toward a validator, for those who like
that kind of thing)

Received on Friday, 5 December 2008 00:56:23 UTC