Re: Change Proposal for HttpRange-14

Hi Jeni,

On 26 March 2012 16:47, Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> wrote:
> Tom,
>
> On 26 Mar 2012, at 16:05, Tom Heath wrote:
>> On 23 March 2012 15:35, Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com> wrote:
>>> I'm sure many people are just deeply bored of this discussion.
>>
>> No offense intended to Jeni and others who are working hard on this,
>> but *amen*, with bells on!
>>
>> One of the things that bothers me most about the many years worth of
>> httpRange-14 discussions (and the implications that HR14 is
>> partly/heavily/solely to blame for slowing adoption of Linked Data) is
>> the almost complete lack of hard data being used to inform the
>> discussions. For a community populated heavily with scientists I find
>> that pretty tragic.
>
>
> What hard data do you think would resolve (or if not resolve, at least move forward) the argument? Some people > are contributing their own experience from building systems, but perhaps that's too anecdotal? Would a
> structured survey be helpful? Or do you think we might be able to pick up trends from the webdatacommons.org > (or similar) data?

A few things come to mind:

1) a rigorous assessment of how difficult people *really* find it to
understand distinctions such as "things vs documents about things".
I've heard many people claim that they've failed to explain this (or
similar) successfully to developers/adopters; my personal experience
is that everyone gets it, it's no big deal (and IRs/NIRs would
probably never enter into the discussion).

2) hard data about the 303 redirect penalty, from a consumer and
publisher side. Lots of claims get made about this but I've never seen
hard evidence of the cost of this; it may be trivial, we don't know in
any reliable way. I've been considering writing a paper on this for
the ISWC2012 Experiments and Evaluation track, but am short on spare
time. If anyone wants to join me please shout.

3) hard data about occurrences of different patterns/anti-patterns; we
need something more concrete/comprehensive than the list in the change
proposal document.

4) examples of cases where the use of anti-patterns has actually
caused real problems for people, and I don't mean problems in
principle; have planes fallen out of the sky, has anyone died? Does it
really matter from a consumption perspective? The answer to this is
probably not, which may indicate a larger problem of non-adoption.

> The larger question is how do we get to a state where we *don't* have this permathread running, year in year
> out. Jonathan and the TAG's aim with the call for change proposals is to get us to that state. The idea is that by
> getting people who think that the specs should say something different to "put their money where their mouth is" > and express what that should be, we have something more solid to work from than reams and reams of
> opinionated emails.

This is a really worthy goal, and thank you to you, Jonathan and the
TAG for taking it on. I long for the situation you describe where the
permathread is 'permadead' :)

> But we do all need to work at it if we're going to come to a consensus. I know everyone's tired of this discussion, > but I don't think the TAG is going to do this exercise again, so this really is the time to contribute, and preferably
> in a constructive manner, recognising the larger aim.

I hear you. And you'll be pleased to know I commented on some aspects
of the document (constructively I hope). If my previous email was
anything but constructive, apologies - put it down to httpRange-14
fatigue :)

Cheers,

Tom.

-- 
Dr. Tom Heath
Senior Research Scientist
Talis Education Ltd.
W: http://www.talisaspire.com/
W: http://tomheath.com/

Received on Monday, 26 March 2012 16:13:34 UTC