Bug 004: EARL Report Profiles

This is feedback on a Last Call Working Draft:

Developer Guide for Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0
W3C Working Draft 10 May 2011
http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-EARL10-Guide-20110510/

You may want to consider whether the EARL report conformance section,
ยง 4.1, should be just one of a wider range of profiles. This segues
into separate issues regarding what constraints should be present and
what should not, but the general idea is that perhaps what is required
in this language is too much for some users' purposes. You have to
demonstrate that this conformance profile is at least reasonably
statistically isomorphic to expected usage patterns. These usage
patterns may be hard to obtain before coming out of CR! Nevertheless,
this is what you have to do.

It may be, for example, that some people will use EARL as private test
data and want to remove assertor data entirely. This may be a popular
profile of EARL, yet it would not be conforming to the present
conformance profile. On the other hand, you want to make sure you
don't bloat conformance profiles unnecessarily. And this is assuming
that there be a standard profile of EARL at all. Certainly if there is
conformance data, then that conformance data should belong to the
schema (Bug 002) and be machine readable (Bug 003), but that
presupposes that there be conformance data of this kind at all.

This bug, then, proposes that though there must be conformance data of
some kind, it does not necessarily have to go so far as a standardised
and quite restrictive profile of EARL as currently exists; but that if
there must be such profiles, then they must carefully model expected
usage patterns and not be some random design. This modelling must be
proven, not argued. This may result in more profiles than currently
exists, or it may not.

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Tuesday, 10 May 2011 22:12:20 UTC