a draft DAWG document outline

Folks,

After coordinating a bit with Dan and Andy, I'm sending the following
document to the WG in preparation for tomorrow's telcon. Some things
to note:

   1. I worked on this for about an hour last week, so it's pretty
      raw.

   2. I wasn't entirely sure what the audience was intended to be, but
      I think we can come up with one document (especially if someone
      maintains a separate issues list) that helps guide our
      discussions *and* starts to inform "everyone else" about what
      we're up to. That is, I don't see a problem with having one
      document that is both inward and outward facing, for now.
      
   3. I picked user stories according to a pretty ad hoc set of
      criteria:
       
        a. I found them interesting
        b. I thought I could rewrite them in a way that made them more
           interesting to non-techies (mostly by amplifying the "story"
           bits)
        c. I could pretty easily imagine what sort of technical
           requirement they motivated.

   4. I haven't looked at any of the new user stories since last
      week's telcon, which is why none of the newer ones made it into
      this draft.

   5. I'm eager to take suggestions and input as to what should be
      here, what shouldn't be, and the like. I'll maintain this
      outline and start morphing it into an actual document for as
      long as that makes sense to the WG. If someone else is
      interested in adding to it, or taking it over, let me know. I
      suspect we can through it into CVS or SVN somewhere if needed.

Best,
Kendall Clark
--
<!-- -*- mode: html -*- -->

Data Access Working Group User Stories Document: A Draft Outline
25 March 2004
Kendall Grant Clark, <kendall@monkeyfist.com>

<h1>Introduction</h1>

A story or story fragment...

XXX: Some bits about the scope and goals of the WG, mostly light
rewrites of bits of the charter.

<h2>Motivation</h2>

The W3C's Data Access Working Group is working on a recommendation for
a query language and data access protocol for the Semantic Web. With
completed, widely implemented recommendations in these areas, we think
that Semantic Web technology development and adoption rates will be
significantly improved. A standard RDF query language would coalesce
the technology intended for querying RDF data in much the same way
that SQL did for RDBMS data. A standard way to access remote RDF
storage servers would do for the Semantic Web and data
interoperability what HTTP did for the Web itself. <!-- this is lame
as written, but there's a parallel set of good historical analogies to
be made here, I think...-->

<h2>Problem Description</h2>

<h3>Query</h3>

Because there are no formal standards in these areas, developers in
industry and in open source projects have created a wide variety of
query languages for RDF data, many of which are listed in <Section
Foo>. These languages lack both a common syntax and a common
semantics; there is, in fact, a wide variety of semantics: from
declartive, SQL-like languages, to path languages, to rule or
production-like systems. The existing languages also exhibit a range
of extensibility features and builtin capabilities, including
inferencing, distributed query, and domain-specific semantics.

<h3>Access</h3>

As for  data access, there are as many different methods of accessing
remote RDF storage servers as there are distinct RDF storage server
projects. Even where the basic access protocol is common -- HTTP,
SOAP, or XML-RPC -- there is little basis upon which generic client
support to access a wide variety of such servers might be developed.

<h1>User Stories</h1>

<h3>Personal Information Management</h3>

<a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004JanMar/0187.html">
Finding John Smith's email address</a>

<a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004JanMar/0072.html">
Regularly executing a query</a>

XXX: make journo-friendly

<a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004JanMar/0041.html">
Monitoring news events without human intervention</a>

XXX: make journo-friendly

<h3>Web Publishing</h3>

<a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004JanMar/0083.html">
Annotating web resources</a>

<a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004JanMar/0094.html">
Discovering what people say about stories
</a>


<h3>Financial Services</h3>

<a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004JanMar/0184.html">
Accountants, customers, and companies
</a>

XXX: make journo-friendly

** Advertising

*** Advertising my restaurant (marketing)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004JanMar/0059.html
XXX: rewrite from perspective of food service provider

** Intelligence

*** Finding unknown human persons (intelligence)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004JanMar/0190.html

** Customer Support

*** Stickler's parts-catalog (customer support)
XXX: waiting on Patrick

** Developer Support

*** Finding input/output documents for test cases (developer support)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004JanMar/0032.html

** Transportation

*** Avoiding traffic jams (transportation)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004JanMar/0041.html
XXX: needs to be fleshed out more


* Technical Requirements
XXX: Sorta needs to happen after a relatively stable set of use cases
is chosen for a first draft...

* Related Technologies and Standards

** RDF Core...
** RDF Query languages
*** SQL-like
*** Rule-ish
*** Path-ish
** SQL
** SOAP and REST

$Id: dawg-ucd-outline.txt,v 1.4 2004/03/26 00:50:33 k Exp $

Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2004 12:04:53 UTC