Re: The way we do things in the Semantic Web community

On 27/04/12 14:09, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-04-27 at 11:00 +0100, Andy Seaborne wrote:
>>
>> On 25/04/12 19:44, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>> ...
>>
>>> On the other hand, please consider my point: sometimes we can't know
>>> whether a design will work until trying it in a fairly big arena, with a
>>> lot of attention.   As I understand the history, XML was designed by a
>>> W3C Working Group.  Has it succeeded?  Yes, sort of.  Has it failed?
>>> Yes, sort of, mostly when it was applied in areas not anticipated by the
>>> WG (like for serializing data).
>>   >
>>> Yes, we probably only get one shot with a W3C Recommendation for this,
>>> so we don't want to get it wrong.  But the Named Graphs paper was seven
>>> years ago.  I don't think sitting back and waiting for more research to
>>> happen is a great strategy, either.
>>
>> This is a strong argument for a two strand approach:
>>
>> 1/ Standardize the minimal, safe ideas (tested)
>> 2/ Layer on top the new ideas to enable usages not currently happening
>> (for testing).
>>
>> If (2) doesn't work out, we have at least helped by standardizing
>> low-level details and so (low-level) software will be compatible.
>> Boring but a step forward.
>
> Agreed, with the caveat that "minimal" may (and probably does) include
> going a bit beyond what everyone considers "safe" and "tested" as of
> today.

Could you expand on that in the thread "Sandro's proposal VS RDF 
Datasets"?  It asks what "minimal" is.  You touched on this a few times 
in different places but I'd find it useful to have a consolidated view 
from you.

>
> As we've been talking about it in recent weeks, I've been growing more
> comfortable with a smaller chunk being standardized here, but I think it
> would be a mistake to be *just* syntax, since (as I said), I don't think
> it's practical for W3C to publish the semantics to a language months or
> years after publishing the syntax.

I'm not suggesting that - publish at the same time (this WG).

>
>       -- Sandro
>
>

Received on Friday, 27 April 2012 13:16:24 UTC