Re: New Specification Published!

Robert,

you ask

[[[
> tally looks like:  / has 5, and # has ... 5 :)
> Unless there's a W3C best practice that we should follow that we don't
> know about?
]]]

there is no formal W3C Best Practice, ie, in the sense of a requirement. But, as Raphaël answered you, the practice until now was indeed to favour '#' for small(er) vocabularies. 

Putting my SW Activity Lead's hat *down* for now:

I must also say that setting up and maintaining a '#' vocabulary under /ns is really easy (you give me one file in, say, turtle or RDF/XML, maybe in RDFa+HTML, and that is it), whereas setting up a '/' approach is certainly more convoluted. My *personal* favourite is certainly a '#' in this case, also to be in line with the other, similar vocabularies.

I cannot judge how widespread the usage of this vocabulary is and any change is certainly a pain. I think it is worthwhile asking the bulk of the implementers whether a change would really be a big problem for them. Put it another way: this is probably the last moment when such a change can still be envisaged... As Bob Morris says in another mail, any choice made now will stick, and has to be 100% stable thereafter.

Thanks

Ivan



On Feb 7, 2013, at 24:49 , Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Raphaël,
> 
> On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 11:19 AM, Raphaël Troncy
> <raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr> wrote:
> 
>>> 1.  We've had that namespace published for quite a while now, and
>>> people are implementing using it.  While they may have to change the
>>> code to update to the new specification, if they were only using the
>>> basics, they might not have to.
>> 
>> Being one who implemented it, I can re-assure you that this will not be a
>> problem. I'm curious though how many oa annotations one can find out there,
>> published on the web? Any study on this?
> 
> No study and not all of these provide globally accessible systems yet,
> but here's a list of pretty well known institutions that are or have
> implemented just off the top of my head:
> 
> British Library
> Bibliotheque Nationale de France
> Oxford University
> Stanford University
> Meertens Institute
> John Hopkins University
> St Louis University
> Drew University
> New York University
> Brown University
> University of Queensland
> Yale University
> Harvard University
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> LANL
> ...
> 
> Yes, it's not a big deal to go in and change the namespace
> definition... but I'd like a better reason for it before we try to get
> all these developers to do it :)
> 
>> I also agree that if you plan to make a change (and I understand that you don't want), then it is better to make it earlier than later.
> 
> Yes, definitely!
> 
>> My personal feeling is that the community is
>> just now actively looking at the new spec and that there is still a time
>> window to change it, but I might be very wrong and under estimate how deep
>> OA has already been implemented by the DL or other community.
> 
> It's a bit deeper than that, but maybe not so deep as we'd end up with
> parallel universes.
> 
> 
>> So, there are two aspects: i) the fact you indeed spell it completely
>> 'openannotation' instead of 'oa' and ii) also that you use a path in your
>> ns.
> 
> 
>> Hence, should we expect that http://www.w3.org/ns/openannotation/ is
>> itself a small ontology that contains modules defined in
>> http://www.w3.org/ns/openannotation/core/ and
>> http://www.w3.org/ns/openannotation/extensions/, etc.
> 
> Yes, I could buy the argument to lose /core/ now that we don't have
> anything in /extensions/ .  On the other hand, it's probably good for
> the future to have the possibility of /extensions/ if we need it.
> 
> Is openannotation/ an ontology? I don't think that it needs to be,
> just like /ns/ doesn't need to resolve to a super-ontology either.
> 
>> No hash in your ns either? People might wonder why you do differently than other vocabs.
> 
>> From the set of namespaces that we use, not including our own the
> tally looks like:  / has 5, and # has ... 5 :)
> Unless there's a W3C best practice that we should follow that we don't
> know about?
> 
> Many thanks!
> 
> Rob
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf