Summary of comments on the Primer FPWD

Mainly for Diana and Kai's benefit, when I was loading up our comments 
tracker the other day, I also jotted down some notes on the comments 
received on the Primer.

We will need to update this doc soon - if only we had more hours in the day.

Notes and links follow
======================

Simon Raboczi (18/8)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-powderwg/2008Aug/0007.html

At the end of section 5 of the POWDER Primer draft,  you have the 
following RDFa example:

<html xmlns:wdrs="http://www.w3.org/2007/05/powder-s#">
   <head>
     <title>The English Civil War
     </title>
   </head>
<body>

....

<div>
  <link rel="wdrs:describedBy" 
href="http://education.example.org/powder.rdf#DR_1" />
    <p>Charles I came to the throne believing in his Divine Right to
rule...
</div>

....

</body>
</html>
I'm pretty sure <link> elements can only appear in the <head>, not in 
the <body> as is done here.  Perhaps this was intended to be an <a> tag 
instead?

============================

Rotan Hanrahan (on behalf of UWA)

Comments received on member list on 28/8.
Answered by me on public list and both KRS & KDS on member list on same day.


1) According to the POWDER primer, certification of DRs is indicated in
order to elevate trust in descriptions.

Who is proposed to provide/manage such certifications? Would this be the
current SSL cert providers, for example?

2) If so, who says that these providers are qualified to assess/create
descriptions?

3) Or is the issue of the environment in which certification is managed
considered out of scope for the POWDER WG?

4) The question was raised internally within my company when someone
observed that this might be the creation of another "money making
scheme", as some people believe the SSL cert providers have been given a
license to print money.

Following the replies, Rotan wrote:

The absence of an authority could be the difference between consumer
acceptance and consumer rejection. Those who have already created a
sense of authority (such as existing SSL cert providers) will be in a
better position to establish authority for DR certification, regardless
of their competence to actually assess the described resources.

Yes, this "bigger picture" is probably out of scope for the WG. No doubt
others have been thinking about it.


Fabien Gandon,

See My mail 1/9
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-powderwg/2008Sep/0001.html

Reading he primer I saw what may be a typo: in the following paragraph
you mention twice "three ways of providing description" but you list
only two.
"The final key element of a Description Resource is the actual
description. There are *three *ways of providing this.
     * As RDF (in a "descriptor set")
     * As one or more tags (in a "tag set")
A DR must contain at least one of these *three *and may contain any
greater number of them, none of which may be empty."

Questions from UWA more formally posed via KRS on member list 4/9
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-powderwg/2008Sep/0003.html

1- is there a normative way by which a human can get a 'plain English'
explanation of a full POWDER document? We've talked about transforming
to HTML using XSLT, but it's not clear (to me) whether the processor
would offer such a service. Or do we simply provide a boilerplate
(English language) XSLT that may be subsequently applied to a powder.xml
file to get such an explanation?

I would suggest that we offer a boilerplate XSLT for starters, or even a
Web form that accepts the URL of a powder.xml as input and returns an
explanation of the contents.

2-  Rotan asked whether we have approached internet security experts
regarding the possibility of loopholes in the powder
certification/authentication part. Whilst I know these have been built
into the spec (including using POWDER to certify DRs, and the use of
sha1sums) I couldn't recall who was involved in that specification.
Rotan mentioned Dr. Phillip Hallam-Baker of Verisign as a contact in
this area.

3- The current issuedby/@ src points to a URI which may refer to a
dc:creator or foaf:agent when transformed into POWDER-S. Is there any
flexibility in this; for example can Open ID be used as an attribution
source?

4- POWDER makes use of vocabularies to provide context to, and a
reference for, descriptions: however there is no current registry of
which vocabularies are available for an author to use. In our examples
we mention WCAG, ICRA and Mobile OK; but how would an author aim to
achieve interoperability (and hence the widest reach) by providing other
descriptions in a well-understood vocabulary? If a registry of such
vocabularies were to be created, would it have any relationship with the
UWA DC Ontology (http://www.w3.org/TR/dcontology/) (either in terms of
technical specification or working practice)?

Mail includes draft comments from KRS, follow up from me and AP on 12/9

Received on Wednesday, 1 October 2008 12:57:00 UTC