Time management

We’re now into 2025, having started the Working Group in 2022. This after years of work in the RDF Task force started in 2019, which in turn was inspired by the Berlin Data Workshop earlier in 2019. The pace of work has been slow, and at the rate we’re going, I’m not too confident we’ll ever finish. I think it’s important that the group set specific goals with dates for milestones we can work towards.

Key among the issues that are being worked on are the abstract syntax (which now seems to be going in the direction of the “liberal baseline” [1]); this drives the concrete syntaxes, for which there is still some disagreement. We need to finalize this and move on. This includes the relevant semantics.

RDF Semantics document seems to have spent most of the time worrying about formatting, rather than anything of substance. Even granted that there are (still!) moving parts, there is a lot of cleanup that needs to be done to the document, but that has been a continuous point of contention. Apparently, we haven’t even agreed to add semantics for rdf:dirLangString as a recognized datatype, at least the perception that the group needs yet another resolution to do this seems to be in the way.

IMO, we’re far to deliberate in the process which prevents needed updates. I would suggest that we try to rapidly resolve issues we can and idetify those issues we’re not ready to resolve and put priority on getting any resolutions we need to allow work to proceed. We’re even behind on testing, as we don’t have a clear understanding on what is, or is not, legal syntax (at least for N-Quads and TriG).

Time to set down some hard milestones and manage the WG’s efforts to meeting those. This may mean that some things are not done, or not done to everyone’s satisfaction, but there needs to be an end to this process sometime.

Gregg Kellogg
gregg@greggkellogg.net

[1] https://github.com/w3c/rdf-star-wg/wiki/RDF-star-%22liberal-baseline%22

Received on Friday, 3 January 2025 19:06:15 UTC