Re: major revision of LDP draft charter

On Sun, 2012-03-18 at 12:13 -0400, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> After various discussions, we've rewritten the Linked Data Platform
> (LDP) draft charter.  New version is here:
> 
>         http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/charter
>         
> The diff is linked from there, but only the last few paragraphs
> (standard charter stuff) are the similar enough for the diff to be
> useful.
> 
> At this point, we're expecting to formally propose this to the W3C
> membership within a week or two, so please review it soon.

As one who has worked at applying W3C standards in the enterprise for
some time, I am glad to see this moving along.

Please consider these suggestions for some different words in the
introduction. The first sentence of the 2nd paragraph says:

"Simple put, the technique is to expose application data objects
("resources") on the Web, ...."

How about instead something like: "Simply put, the technique is to
represent things of interest (to the enterprise) as resources on the
Web, ...."? "Resources" in that sentence means something like
rdfs:Resource, and therefore can mean a "data object" or a person,
document, part, building, idea, or any other thing of interest to the
business.

The same paragraph concludes: "...and the use of RDF brings automatic
integration of data across systems and applications." I fear this
statement would draw easy criticism from skeptics and build false hope
for newcomers. RDF may be a royal road, but it is still hard work. I
would strike this phrase. You could perhaps replace it with some
specific, realistic claims about the benefits of RDF and linked data.

The 3rd paragraph of the introduction is unclear, and again raises
questions by describing the system as "relatively simple". Consider
something like this as a replacement:

"The Linked Data Platform is an enterprise-focused collection of
techniques and services based on the W3C Semantic Web stack. Simple LDP
applications can be developed and deployed using only RDF with minor
extensions to an existing HTTP infrastructure. More extensive LDP
applications can be built using any other specialized features such as
RDFS, SPARQL, OWL, SKOS, RIF, Prov, etc."

Regards,
--Paul

Received on Sunday, 18 March 2012 20:42:46 UTC