Re: Beginning work on an official Web Access Control spec.

Thanks again for raising this, Andrei.

I know you've been doing a lot of work on this at MIT and from what you 
and others have said it's clear that there's a lot of work in the public 
domain. Good. The road from there to an actual standard is though still 
quite steep I'm afraid.

The W3C members are currently reviewing a proposal that will merge and 
expand upon the Semantic Web and eGovernment activities and that 
includes a couple of new working groups [1,2] (if approved, it makes me 
Data Activity Lead too so that's why I'm responding to you). We're also 
expecting a new WG to be formed following the recent RDF Validation 
workshop [3]. Our resources are, of course, finite and so committing 
resources - I mean Team time - to a new WG can't happen without a lot of 
evidence that the work is needed, likely to be implemented, and makes a 
real impact on the Web. And even then we actually have to have a team 
member available. The vehicle to gather that evidence is a Community 
Group and I strongly encourage you to start one of those.

Use the CG to gather evidence of demand, existing and likely 
implementations, and to build the community as widely as possible. You 
can write a document that looks a lot like a standard too. See the ODRL 
CG's output for instance! [4]. If you can do all that - and it's hard - 
then we *might* be able to consider a new WG sometime next year.

Don't be put off - the CG route is made for situations like this and I 
hope it will be successful in developing ideas for WebACL - we need it. 
True, it doesn't get you access to the Zakim bridge, no. But you get 
just about everything else [5] and Google Hangouts, Skype, WebEx, 
GoToMeeting and so on provide reasonable alternatives.

Cheers

Phil.



[1] http://www.w3.org/2013/05/odbp-charter.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2013/05/lcsv-charter.html
[3] https://www.w3.org/2012/12/rdf-val/report
[4] http://www.w3.org/community/odrl/
[5] http://www.w3.org/community/about/tool/

On 17/10/2013 14:05, Andrei Sambra wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> For those of you who know me, please skip this paragraph. For the others, I
> would first like to introduce myself. My name is Andrei Sambra and for the
> past three years I have been involved in different W3C groups, such as
> WebID, LDP and RWW (co-chair). As an advocate of Semantic Web technologies,
> especially those taking user privacy into consideration, I am currently
> working on two projects, MyProfile [1] (WebID provider / social network)
> and RWW.IO [2], the later including support for WebID, LDP and WAC [3].
> RWW.IO is a Read/Write Web-based personal data store.
>
> Over the past few years, we have noticed that Linked Data is no longer a
> technology limited to the public space, finding its way into consumer
> applications. As a consequence, it becomes increasingly important to be
> able to protect access to private/sensitive resources. To this regard, the Web
> Access Control (WAC) ontology [3] has been put together by Tim Berners-Lee,
> offering the basic means to set up ACLs. Due to its nature (i.e. an
> ontology) however, it does not provide the formalism necessary to implement
> it in order to achieve interoperability, nor does it provide an organized
> space where it can be discussed and improved.
>
> The reason behind writing the email is that I would like to know how many
> people are interested in participating to the standardization process of a
> Web Access Control spec.
>
> The Read Write Web community group has so far been the host of inquiries
> regarding the WAC ontology. However, being a community group, it does not
> have access to W3C's teleconference system, nor to the issue tracking
> system. Depending on your interest in a WAC spec, and the preliminary
> discussions we might have, we may very well have to create a dedicated
> working group. For now however, I suggest we use the public RWW list (
> public-rww@w3.org) in order to coordinate the efforts on this subject.
>
> Please let me know how you stand on this subject and perhaps suggest a way
> to count who is interested in participating (doodle, something else maybe?).
>
> Best wishes,
> Andrei
>
> [1] https://my-profile.eu/
> [2] https://rww.io/
> [3] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl
>

-- 

Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

Received on Thursday, 17 October 2013 17:28:39 UTC