Re: status of xsd:duration in OWL (and RIF and SPARQL) - ACTION-164: RDF WG

On Mon, 2012-05-07 at 11:42 +0100, Bijan Parsia wrote:
> On 7 May 2012, at 11:29, Michael Schneider wrote:
> 
> > Am 07.05.2012 00:19, schrieb Ian Horrocks:
> >> Hi Bijan (et al),
> >> 
> >> According to my understanding, we agreed to keep the WG alive so that we could fix any OWL 2 problems caused by changes to XSD 1.1 and update the OWL 2 Rec to reference the XSD 1.1 Rec. It was also foreseen that we could take advantage of this update to fix any editorial errata in the OWL 2 Rec.
> >> 
> >> While I agree that the dividing line between editorial errata and substantive changes is not 100% clear, it does seem pretty obvious to me that adding support for a new datatype goes beyond the spirit of this agreement.
> > 
> > I agree!
> 
> But, you know, who the heck cares about the spirit of some agreement?

The people on the other side of the agreement.

And since we don't know who exactly they are, it's not trivial to
renegotiate it.    I agree if we could easily ask them, they'd almost
certainly say Yes.

The way we renegotiate, without knowing who they are exactly is to
re-charter -- it doesn't really ask everybody, but it's a reasonable
effort in that direction.

If we did it without going through this hoop, we'd be risking people not
trusting W3C as much.   That might be a risk you or I are willing to
take, but it's not up to us, it's up the W3C management and/or the
Advisory Committee.   (Oddly enough, the way we ask the AC is... by
rechartering.)  But I'm happy to ask management if they're willing to
take this risk.  I totally agree with your assessment that this is a
reasonable thing to do, and I have a hard time imagining folks objecting
on other-than-procedural grounds.    Still, following procedures is, to
put it bluntly, a large part of what makes institutions function, and
the Web IMO needs W3C to function as an institution.

   -- Sandro


> This is precisely the sort of procedural ridiculousness that I would have thought that the W3C would have shed after it's encounter with the WhatWG and HTML5. Procedural nicety is not an intrinsically good thing.
> 
> We're faced with a situation where OWL will be out of synch with XML Schema and potentially with SPARQL and RDF because of what is substantively an exceedingly minor change and arguably one we would have included if WXS had been finished at the time.
> 
> Really, if you don't want this change, just say you don't want this change. Oppose it substantively, not procedurally. I don't see that there's a plausible slippery slope here. It's not like we're proposing arbitrary new datatypes or otherwise unscoped changes.
> 
> (We should fix Date and Time as well.)
> 
> Now, I'm not going to make too much of it (or is that too late? :)), because there are de facto alternatives. But that's just saying that this procedure sucks and that gatekeeping by procedural nit-worshiping is a real drag on quality.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bijan.

Received on Monday, 7 May 2012 11:48:04 UTC