Re: Preparing editor's drafts -- Q's for the team contacts

On 25 May 2011, at 09:37, Ivan Herman wrote:
> we have to define what the name of our archive is (I guess 'rdf' is the obvious answer)

+1

> and who the 'contact' persons are (I guess Sandro and I at the minimum, it may be wise to add somebody else; this will become a big archive).

I'll offer to be one of the contacts for the repository.

>> 2. I assume we will do public editor's drafts. What will the IRI of the RDF Concepts draft be?

What I meant to ask here: Many documents have a public editor's draft somewhere in W3C space, that always reflects the latest state of the version-controlled repository.

Like these:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/r2rml/
http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/docs/query-1.1/rq25.xml

Public editor's drafts are a very good thing. The question is if the Mercurial repo can somehow be periodically mirrored into the W3C web space.

> 1. We aim at a set of documents that fully and absolutely supersede the old documents. This means we'd continue to use the http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/ for what we call the 'short URI' in our document management jargon with, of course, the 'dated URI-s' reflecting the current date. This means that, in future, if somebody uses the short uri as a reference, he/she will fall on the new version of the document.

I am in favour of that.

> Note that this may lead to some disruptions during the development process when users will suddenly find themselves reading working drafts. As an example, this is what the xml guys did: the http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/ URI leads to the latest (5th edition as of today) of XML.

I am *not* in favour of that. Some of the documents will go through a certain amount of churn, and the new features like multigraph might be in a rough state for a while, and I would not like people looking for a W3C REC to be presented with work in progress.

> I guess it may be possible to use a short name for the development time and change this on the last minute to switch to the old names

This sounds like a good solution to me.

> but I would not favour that, personally; it may become messy on long run.

What exactly is the concern?

> If we adopt a numbering (like the SPARQL and OWL have done), then we would probably use a different short name. If we just go for a 'second edition' then the XML approach might be the winning one.

I thought a bit more about this.

I guess we're going to want to say things like: “RDF (old) didn't have multiple graphs, but RDF (new) does.” Or “In RDF (old) this would have been two triples, but in RDF (new) it's just one.” Saying “first-edition RDF” and “second-edition RDF” doesn't seem quite right for something that actually includes relevant new features. Saying “RDF 1.0” and “RDF 1.1” seems more appropriate. So my vote is for RDF 1.1.

Thanks,
Richard

Received on Wednesday, 25 May 2011 10:22:31 UTC