Response to your LC Comment -2405 on Media Ontology spec

Dear Doug,

The Media Annotations Working Group has reviewed the comments you sent 
[1] on the Last Call Working Draft [2] of the Ontology for Media 
Resource 1.0 published on 08 June 2010.
Thank you for having taken the time to review the document and to send 
us comments.

The Working Group's response to your comment is included below (your 
points are copied and our responses start with an arrow ->).
Please review it carefully and *let us know by email at 
public-media-annotation@w3.org if you agree with it or not*
before deadline date [09-oct-2010].
In case of disagreement, you are requested to provide a specific 
solution for or a path to a consensus with the Working Group.
If such a consensus cannot be achieved, you will be given the 
opportunity to raise a formal objection which will
then be reviewed by the Director during the transition of this document 
to the next stage in the W3C Recommendation Track.

Thanks,

For the Media Annotations Working Group,
Véronique Malaisé

1. 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-media-annotation/2010Jul/0016.html
2. http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-mediaont-10-20100608/

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MAWG Resolution:
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Ontology:

As an editorial comment, there seems to be an academic tone here, with 
the use of the word "our" rather than "this specification", detailed 
rationales for decisions (which is good in itself, but ), and a 
generally tentativeness ("Although the set of properties is now limited, 
it already constitutes a proof of concept", section 4.1.1, "proof-read 
our interpretation", etc.). I recommend you simply state in the Status 
section that feedback is welcome (with short inline notes commenting on 
which sections are in particular need of feedback), that there may be 
considerations for possible future versions of the spec, and that you 
leave room for extensions; if this is done right and sees uptake, it 
will almost certainly be the first of a lineage of specs.

-> The Ontology document will be updated in order to remove fuzzy 
statements or inquiries for feedback. Your solution is an elegant way to 
deal with them, and we will update the Status section accordingly.

1 Introduction
The introduction could benefit by trimming it down. Split the
relationship to Dublin Core into a subsection. Explain the uses of this 
ontology to the expected readers of the spec: possible implementers, 
content authors, and users of the ontology.

-> Indeed, we will rewrite the Introduction section, split the mention 
of Dublin Core from the rest and be more precise regarding the goal of 
the Ontology.

1.1 Purpose of this specification
After reading this, I'm left wondering whether this ontology is expected 
to be used in metadata itself, or if it is only a mapping. If someone 
were to use this ontology by itself, would that be a misuse? Explain why 
or why not in this section.

-> We agreed at the last F2F that the Ontology can be used as a metadata 
scheme in itself, so we will update the Ontology document accordingly. A 
paragraph will be added that specifies the purpose of the specification 
and its scope: the property list, its RDF implementation and the set of 
mappings.

4.1.2 Core properties
All the property names are prefixed with "ma:", which could be confused 
as part of the property name. Simply stating that the properties are in 
the Media Annotations namespace is enough (as long as you provide 
concrete examples of use).

-> We decided on keeping the ma: prefix when describing the property 
names, but we are rewriting the syntax in which we present their ranges: 
it does not include semicolons anymore. In this way we hope that the 
syntax will be more clear. We are also adding concrete examples of 
properties' values in the table.

4.2.1 Rationale regarding the mapping table "Its namespace is "ma", for 
Media Annotation." The spec seems to conflate the namespace with the 
prefix; usually, a namespace is something like 
"http://w3.org/MediaAnnotations/", which is often bound in a serialized 
document with a common prefix, like "ma:" using a namespace declaration; 
the prefix is not considered universal. (In my opinion, this is a flawed 
design for Namespaces in XML, but that's the convention.)

-> We corrected the sloppyness of calling the ma prefix a namespace at 
another place in the document, and will have to correct this in the last 
place where the confusion unfortunately still figures in the document.

4.2.2 The mapping table
I really like the level of detail this spec goes into for performing the 
mapping (though I guess it's still a work in progress. The mappings seem 
a bit hidden, though, and they are really the meat of the spec. I assume 
you are trying to keep the spec manageably short, but I would suggest 
either keeping the tables inline in the body of the single-page spec, or 
splitting it out into chapters with each chapter a short description of 
the mapped ontology, followed by the table mapping itself.

-> We considered the idea of splitting the table into sections, but it 
turned out to be quite a complicated operation. Having the table as a 
whole also shows a nice overview. We are now importing it in the main 
document, so following the first option that you suggest: keeping it 
inline with the body of the document.

Received on Wednesday, 29 September 2010 06:57:13 UTC