- From: Dan Scott <denials@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2013 06:12:42 -0500
- To: Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl>
- Cc: "public-schemabibex@w3.org" <public-schemabibex@w3.org>
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 3:34 AM, Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl> wrote: > Hi all > > On 12/11/13 1:17 AM, Corey A Harper wrote: >> >> [...] I don't have the time to put in the hard work hashing out the >> details of how to reconcile and render compatible the 3 or 4 (or 5?) >> different proposals on the table. I really don't think they're that far >> apart. I wish I had more bandwidth to work on it. >> >> Given that I don't I believe it's probably best that I back out of the >> conversation now and not join tomorrow's call. >> >> Regrets for that, and thank you all for the work you've put in on this. > > > > I'm on a similar position. > > When we started the group I had the feeling that this was about the mapping > of existing data (and the vocabularies that go with them) to schema.org, > possibly suggesting extensions to schema.org when there was a big miss > there. > > In this respect one recent addition to the Periodical thread, i.e. trying to > connect to Bibo, fits quite well. > > But the entire discussion, where people think of what periodicals/volumes > are, and then compare it to what they are in an already existing and > complete approach (comics), then try to map to an existing ontology (Bibo) > and then question again what periodicals and volume and citations are, > that's just too much. > > To be clear: I respect very much the work being done. And I'm sure it is > useful to the community in the end. It's just that I too don't have the time > to contribute that much, unfortunately. These comments are both fair and concerning. I don't want to lose the expertise that Antoine, Corey, and others bring to the table; the periodicals proposal has evolved a _ton_ for the better thanks to the discussion by the group. I am in the extremely fortunate position of being able to contribute a lot of time to the schema.org effort right now. Now that I (finally) feel reasonably comfortable with schema.org, RDFa, RDFS, and some of the related ontologies, I would like to be able to contribute towards this group's goals (and I believe I have been). But I don't want to waste my time, or anyone else's time. The subject of your email, Antoine, invoking "Process", definitely hits home. With periodicals, I have been trying to keep a focused scope in the hopes of producing tangible results, while still encouraging and incorporating feedback and suggestions. My approach for that has been to try and spawn new discussion threads where something might be able to be focused on separately, independently, and later, in the hopes that we can maintain focus and achieve small wins. I'm not sure that that approach has been working or helping or the most efficient, though. That said, I apologize for adding complexity to the discussions by trying to synthesize the comics proposal with our periodicals proposal, once the existence of the comics proposal was reraised on this list. As an existing proposal, it felt unfair for us to put forward a subset--especially if we changed the underpinnings to their comics class. And I also thought that as a proposal that had been brought forward for adoption, the comics side of it would have been a bit more ready to go (to be fair, the comics proposal was one of the first to be brought forward to schema.org). I would like to continue the work on comics, but as a follow-on to core periodicals. If the group would like me to work with Peter and Henry on that outside of schemabibex entirely, I can do that. Aligning the periodical-related portions of Bibo seemed like a clear, fast win that would strengthen the proposal. Aligning the rest of the ontology... well, yeah, that's why I suggested deferring that work to later. We do need _some_ mechanism of working efficiently towards common goals that allows for participants to say "I don't understand X; can you explain?" or "I think this part of the proposal would be better if it did Y instead, because of A & B" or "I think that this use case does not apply here; maybe it should be attached to a different proposal." or "Okay, let's wrap this up: do we agree or disagree with this?" To avoid misunderstandings, I've tried to be very explicit in describing my rationale for particular positions. I also suspect at some point someone (probably myself, in a state of forgetfulness) will want to catch up on what we mulled over and how we came to decisions. But I recognize that verbosity adds to the cognitive load as well ("Oh no, another long email from Dan..."). To try to reach consensus, or at least a better understanding of what challenges remain towards achieving consensus, I've tried soliciting feedback for the proposal, first on Dec. 4th, and then again yesterday, explicitly asking for concrete & constructive criticism that can be acted on in the hopes that we could shake out most of the remaining details before our next call. The most recent call for feedback got one reply--from myself. That's hard to interpret; I would go with "not enough time for responses", except there many other messages on different threads that came after it. I've been trying, but I feel like I've been failing. So, please: if my communication style or approach to putting together proposals is part of the problem, let me know how I can improve. And... apologies for another long email :/ Dan
Received on Wednesday, 11 December 2013 11:13:10 UTC