- From: Libby Miller <Libby.Miller@bristol.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 13:41:11 +0000 (GMT)
- To: public-esw@w3.org
- cc: ilrt-semanticweb@bristol.ac.uk, ilrt-mostly <ilrt-mostly@bristol.ac.uk>
I recently attended the W3C technical Plenary in Boston: http://www.w3.org/2002/10/allgroupoverview/ This was the third such event (they happen yearly). They are a week of working group and interest group meetings with an all-group meeting on the Wednesday. The working groups meetings are sometimes open to observers, sometimes not; the plenary is completely open. The main event for me this time was a "Semantic Web Architecture Meeting" - an ad-hoc group created to address various semantic web issues, which met all of Thursday 6th and Friday 7th. The meeting page now contains links to the relevant parts of the logs, as well as attendees: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/meetings/tech-200303/ A major issue in this meeting and in general in the week (at least among the people I met) was RDF query. Chartering an RDF query language working group has seemed like a good idea to some people for a while, but it was unclear what the scope would be (e.g. should it be rules and query or just query; should it be restricted to a simple language or encompass complex ones; should it include protocols). Alberto and Andy's usecases doc seems to have meant more discussion on the matter. http://rdfstore.sourceforge.net/2002/06/24/rdf-query/ There were several query specific meetings: a birds of a feather lunch on Wednesday; a 2 hour evening meeting on thursday, and several hours in the Semantic Web architecture meeting on Friday. Various logs are available for all except the lunch meeting: http://www.w3.org/2003/03/06-swarch-irc from 23:31:19 http://www.w3.org/2003/03/07-swarch-irc from start to 01:15:29 (Thursday night BOF) and 13:20:53 to 15:40:32 (and lightning talks afterwards - for Friday morning session) The Friday query session was the most formal, led by Tim Berners-Lee, and centering around his document: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/meetings/tech-200303/query snippet: [[ So, if work were begun in this area, formally or informally, more or less in chronological order, one might hope to see: Abstract syntax of query language - probably described in RDF. Definition of a few conformance levels (monotonically increasing in features supported) A common concrete syntax in compact (non-XML) form Ontology for description of inference services provided by a service. A set or sets of standard functions A profile or profiles which combine the above to enhance interoperability, when experience with common engines is sufficient to define interop levels. ]] My impression was that there was eventually some agreement that such a working group would need to start with the basics first, probably RDF query only, starting with simple queries. This was after extensive discussions about the relationship between rules and RDF query, in the BOFs and in the Friday session. Personally, I think we can get a long way without a working group, for example by creating testcases for interoperability, as is our intention in the RDF query meetings run as an input to the SWAD-Europe deliverable 7.2 (the new query testcase page that Dan Brickley made is at http://www.w3.org/2003/03/rdfqr-tests/). Here's what I did in the week. Mon 3rd Did one of my action items from calendaring, namely wrote up how to generate the RDF iCalendar schema using CWM: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-calendar/2003Mar/0003.html Talked to Eric Prud'hommeaux about his work mapping RDF query langauges to relational databases, and creating relational database structures from a group of RDF triples. Pointed him in the direction of Jan Grant. Eric has a document about this: http://www.w3.org/2003/01/21-RDF-RDB-access/#migration Chatted with Pat Hayes, Harold Boley, EricP, Danbri about query and rules. Pat talked about his experiences in creating DAML QL. (Daml QL: http://www.daml.org/2002/08/dql/dql (model) http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/projects/dql/syntax.shtml (proposed syntax) ) Thought that it might be useful for testcases for query if there was a converter between various RDF query syntaxes; wondered how possible this was. Hacked on query code in the evening. Tuesday 4th Talked to Hugo Haas about his calendar usecases, and Bert Bos about the calendar stuff he's been doing: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-calendar/2003Mar/0005.html At lunch talked with Benjamin Grosof and Harold Boley about rules and query. Later spent a long time getting conversion to work between various query languages. The result was a first pass at a query converter: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2003/03/query/readme.html Thusday 6th Semantic web discussions, see http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/meetings/tech-200303/#logs and individual entries in http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/meetings/tech-200303/ for each section. A great deal was discussed. The meeting page has links to logs and references. Three sections stood out for me: 1. RDF applications (Dan Brickley/Dan Connolly) A discussion of what vocabularies people use in the room, and what RDF data is out there: http://www.w3.org/2003/03/06-swarch-irc#T15-35-06 2. Embedding RDF in html (led by Ralph Swick) Some of the html WG came along, and Steven Pemberton presented a possible way of getting around the issue that RDF in html cannot be validated by DTD: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2003Feb/0103.html There was some discussion of the possibility of anXML syntax for N-Triple, and also a discussion of XML schema and RDF: "DanC: It's not possible to write one-last-true-schema for RDF/XML." RelaxNG does much better. Several people expressed interest in helping HTML WG make a better meta syntax. Jos de Roo: If you can't do it by value, due it by reference 3. Social meaning discussion (led by Jeremy Carroll) http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/meetings/tech-200303/social-meaning.html results: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003JanMar/0486.html Evening meeting about rdf queries and rules - see http://www.w3.org/2003/03/06-swarch-irc from 23:31:19 http://www.w3.org/2003/03/07-swarch-irc from start to 01:15:29 Friday 9-4 Semantic web discussions, see http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/meetings/tech-200303/#logs and individual entries in http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/meetings/tech-200303/ for each section. The query discussion interested me the most - see above for my impressions about that. There were also a number of lightning talks, many about query. There were interesting presentations for Liddy Neville and from Guus Schreiber about best practice, education and outreach. Guus: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/meetings/tech-200303/best-practices http://www.w3.org/2003/03/07-swarch-irc#T19:33:18 Liddy: http://www.w3.org/2003/03/07-swarch-irc#T19:53:00 -- My photos from the week are at http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/photos/2003/03/03/ http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/photos/2003/03/04/ http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/photos/2003/03/05/ http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/photos/2003/03/06/ http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/photos/2003/03/07/ Libby
Received on Thursday, 13 March 2003 08:41:59 UTC