Comments on the prov-dm document

Dear all,

First of all, congratulation for the publication!

I have spent some time today reading through the document. My comments are _not_ on the technical aspect at this moment but, rather, coming from my role at W3C and working with the Semantic Web community at large.

My problem is that the document is indeed difficult to read and fairly complex. This is not a technical objection, and is probably the nature of the beast. However, we all have to be careful not to alienate a community which can easily push back on very complex specifications. We have had this issue in the past with other Semantic Web technologies and, in some cases, we are still paying the price for those.

The way to handle this is to publish, alongside the formal spec, outreach documents as soon as possible. These documents should show, via, for example, simple Linked Data type examples, that the model (and its RDF syntax) can be used to express simple things in a simple manner, in spite of the complexity of the model as a whole. It is important to keep that famous 80/20 cut in mind, and show that 80% of the use cases, that are usually relatively simple, can be expressed by simple means, leaving the complex features for the much fewer complex examples. If the community can be convinced that this can be done with the current model, we have all won. If not, the community may ignore this document and opt for a simple alternative somewhere else to cover most of its needs.

As I said, this has to be shown early on. Whether those are blog entries here and there (the chairs of the WG have access to the Semantic Web Activity Blog and can therefore put anything that the WG agrees upon), whether it is a first draft of a Primer that the group is planning to publish... these are all valid options, they do not exclude one other. But I would really encourage the WG to go out to the general community very quickly with many small messages along those lines. Otherwise we all incur the danger of working in vein, ie, without general acceptance...

Thanks again for all your work!

Ivan

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