Re: [Fwd: Sparql editorial comment: acknowledge prior art]

On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 16:57 +0100, Seaborne, Andy wrote:
> Is it normal to have an acknowledgement of prior art section in a W3C 
> recommendation?  A quick scan of other recs suggests that it is not.  Any 
> acknowledgements sections seem to be acknowledgements to the WG process, not 
> to prior art.
> 
> As this is not an academic paper, I propose continuing to not have a prior 
> art section.

First, note that UC&R has a "Related Technologies and Standards"
section
 http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-dawg-uc/#relts
that cites prior work indirectly via the "RDF Query Survey". In our
response to Jacco van Ossenbruggen, let's note that.

Second, re acknowledgements in rq23 itself, I wrote about
this back on 21 Mar 2005:

"Eek... no acknowledgements section... I recommend you add one,
and each time you integrate a comment, acknowledge the commentor
by name."
 -- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2005JanMar/0383

See also a posting to the TAG internal list
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/tag/2004Oct/0028

Since I wrote it, I can quote it here in public:

[[
For the acknowledgements section, I prefer the style where
each contributor is acknowledged by name. I just did
a scan of the (5000 line) CVS history of webarch.html,
and here are the by-name references to contributors
that I found. I'd like to see these in the acks section.
]]

And Norm agreed, and the result is: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#acks


> In practical terms there are real problems: in SPARQL there are ideas that 
> were independently invented/suggested by more than one party, ideas that 
> started in personal email many years before the WG started and ideas that 
> have morphed so much form the initial idea as to be distinctly different. 
> We have already had a similar request for references to non-RDF query 
> systems.  The only consist and fair policy is to have no such section.

I'm not sure that's the only fair policy, but I agree that it's probably
more trouble than it's worth to do a nice edited history of the ideas
in SPARQL.

I think it *is* worth some trouble to put in the acknowledgements
section the name of every person who contributed text to the
spec, though.

> 	Andy

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Monday, 1 August 2005 05:39:16 UTC