Beginning work on an official Web Access Control spec.

Dear all,

For those of you who know me, please skip this paragraph. For the others, I
would first like to introduce myself. My name is Andrei Sambra and for the
past three years I have been involved in different W3C groups, such as
WebID, LDP and RWW (co-chair). As an advocate of Semantic Web technologies,
especially those taking user privacy into consideration, I am currently
working on two projects, MyProfile [1] (WebID provider / social network)
and RWW.IO [2], the later including support for WebID, LDP and WAC [3].
RWW.IO is a Read/Write Web-based personal data store.

Over the past few years, we have noticed that Linked Data is no longer a
technology limited to the public space, finding its way into consumer
applications. As a consequence, it becomes increasingly important to be
able to protect access to private/sensitive resources. To this regard, the Web
Access Control (WAC) ontology [3] has been put together by Tim Berners-Lee,
offering the basic means to set up ACLs. Due to its nature (i.e. an
ontology) however, it does not provide the formalism necessary to implement
it in order to achieve interoperability, nor does it provide an organized
space where it can be discussed and improved.

The reason behind writing the email is that I would like to know how many
people are interested in participating to the standardization process of a
Web Access Control spec.

The Read Write Web community group has so far been the host of inquiries
regarding the WAC ontology. However, being a community group, it does not
have access to W3C's teleconference system, nor to the issue tracking
system. Depending on your interest in a WAC spec, and the preliminary
discussions we might have, we may very well have to create a dedicated
working group. For now however, I suggest we use the public RWW list (
public-rww@w3.org) in order to coordinate the efforts on this subject.

Please let me know how you stand on this subject and perhaps suggest a way
to count who is interested in participating (doodle, something else maybe?).

Best wishes,
Andrei

[1] https://my-profile.eu/
[2] https://rww.io/
[3] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl