Re: Dependency on XSD 1.1 -- possible compromise (supplementary)

Sorry for yet another long email, but Sandro rightly pointed out that  
a little more background information might be useful!

As has been mentioned before, OWL's use of XSD 1.1 turned into a  
problem when XSD fell behind schedule in August.  (The Schema Working  
Group is currently aiming to end CR in January.) The basic problem is  
that W3C Recommendations are not generally supposed to normatively  
refer to works-in-progress or works with unclear IPR.  A W3C  
Candidate Recommendation (like the current XSD 1.1) is a work-in- 
progress with unclear IPR until it reaches Recommendation.   
Exceptions have been made from time to time in the past, but people  
report being unhappy with the results, and getting an except made is  
looking to be quite difficult.  So we're in a bad situation, and  
we're looking for the least bad way out.

What we've come up with is to plan on publishing a slightly modified  
OWL 2 as a Proposed Recommendation next week, and (assuming a  
positive AC review) as a Recommendation in about 6 weeks.  Then, in  
some months, whenever XSD 1.1 gets to Recommendation, publishing a  
"Second Edition" of OWL 2.  Editions are a fairly light-weight way to  
make minor changes and bug fixes to Recommendations.  To do this,  
we'll need to keep the OWL Working Group around, essentially dormant,  
collecting any errata and waiting for XSD 1.1.

The "slight modification" is to normatively refer to XSD 1.0, instead  
of XSD 1.1, and make all the OWL 2 features that depend on XSD 1.1 be  
optional.  The text would make clear that we intend to issue the  
edition described above, and that the XSD Candidate Recommendation  
can be used as an indication of what that Second Edition will be  
using. The precise text is more or less as per my previous email (a  
small refinement to the reference wording was made in the meantime),  
plus we added a note in Syntax where it says that "Most datatypes are  
taken from the set of XML Schema Datatypes, version 1.1" pointing to  
the text in Conformance that explains the current situation, and we  
changed a comment in the OWL 2 XML Serialization to refer to "XML  
Schema" rather than "XML Schema 1.1".

I already made the changes to the documents so that you can see more  
clearly what the result would be. The relevant changes are to the XSD  
1.1 reference [1], the note in SS&FS [2], the explanatory section in  
Conformance [3], and the small change in the XML Serialization [4].

Regards,
Ian

[1] http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/References/ref-xml-schema-datatypes
[2] http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/index.php? 
title=Syntax&diff=25666&oldid=25642
[3] http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/index.php? 
title=Conformance&action=history
[4] http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/index.php? 
title=OWL_XML_Schema&diff=25667&oldid=25193

Received on Wednesday, 16 September 2009 11:07:21 UTC