PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-16: RDF Collections

If there are no objections to this proposal by this Thursday, October
21st at 13:00 UTC, we will close ISSUE-16: RDF Collections.

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/track/issues/16

After a great deal of discussion on whether or not to support RDF
collections in RDFa, the Working Group could not reach consensus on the
proposal that Ivan put forward, nor could it reach consensus on whether
or not the timing was right to tackle this issue.

The main issue revolved around the uncertainty of collections in RDF.
There were a number of claims made during the discussion of RDF collections:

1. Hardly anybody uses them on the OpenWeb - hit the billion triples
   challenge data and you will only find a handful of rdf:Seq, rdf:Bag,
   and rdf:List triples.
2. RDF Collections are used heavily in OWL and XMP.
3. People tend to fall back to using things like ex:position to provide
   lists. Unordered lists are usually expressed as a collection of
   properties with different values. People are modeling collections
   in different ways - there is no clear pattern.
4. Expressing linked lists is something that many people don't need to
   do, no need for the added complexity in RDFa. Why do we need to
   add a feature that hardly anybody is going to use?
5. It's not the RDFa WG's job to figure out how to best express
   collections in RDF - it should be part of the RDF Next WG's work.

Opinions on each item above varied greatly, but the thoughts at the end
of the discussion were that we were not going to be able to reach
consensus on how to express lists in RDFa much less how we would do it.

This proposal asserts that the complexity of designing a mechanism for
expressing collections in RDF is very large and that there is no clear
path forward that would gain the consensus of the RDFa WG, therefore the
issue should be closed and referred to the RDF Next WG for further
consideration when it starts up.

Please comment before Thursday, October 21st at 13:00 UTC if you object
to this proposal. If there are no objections by that time, this issue
will be closed. If there are objections, the RDFa Working Group will
perform a straw-poll and decide whether or not to close the issue before
entering Last Call.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Saving Journalism - The PaySwarm Developer API
http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/09/12/payswarm-api/

Received on Tuesday, 19 October 2010 01:24:16 UTC