Re: Time management

Hi Gregg and Andy,    I absolutely agree with Gregg assessment of the current state of the Working Group and strongly support your suggestions.   The pace of work has indeed been slow, and without clear milestones, the risk of stagnation remains high. Setting specific goals with concrete dates is not only practical but also essential for maintaining momentum and achieving meaningful progress.   I completely concur with Gregg view that we need to finalize the abstract syntax, particularly as it relates to the "liberal baseline," and resolve disagreements around concrete syntaxes. This will allow us to address the broader issues around semantics effectively.    Gregg suggestion to establish hard milestones-even if it means leaving some tasks incomplete-is a necessary step. Without this, the risk of indefinite delays grows, and the WG's efforts may fail to deliver the impactful outcomes we aspire to achieve.   Best,   Dominik  
     
      
       
        Dnia 03 stycznia 2025 22:46 Andy Seaborne <andy@apache.org> napisał(a):
       
    
       
         On 03/01/2025 19:05, Gregg Kellogg wrote: 
 
 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. 
 
  
 +1 
  
 
 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). 
 
  
 Identifying areas to prioritise sounds like a good idea. This can be  
 combined with discussion items. There is a backlog of "needs discussion"  
 items - there is ten or more elapsed weeks of backlog at the moment. We  
 can best use telecon time on items that have material, ideally with  
 someone to summarise the state and say what is needed next. 
  
 
 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. 
 
  
 +1 
  
 
  
 Gregg Kellogg 
 gregg@greggkellogg.net 
 
  
     Andy 
  
 
  
 [1]  github.com https://github.com/w3c/rdf-star-wg/wiki/RDF-star-%22liberal-baseline%22