State of SSN

Dear all,

As team contact for the WG, my role is not necessarily to get involved 
in every aspect of each of our deliverables. As is abundantly clear from 
our discussions over the last couple of years, the WG members are the 
domain experts, not me. But, all is not well in the state of SSN and so 
I feel that I need to take a more active position. My mail on Monday [1] 
is part of that.

My understanding of the current situation is likely to be less than 100% 
accurate - I know that - but what I see is:

1. There is a lot of prior work that predates the WG: SSN, O&M, Dolce.

2. There is SOSA, which is, I think I'm right in saying, largely 
inspired by the work to represent O&M in OWL and create a simple version 
for wider use.

3. There is a very understandable desire to see this work become a 
formal standard - that's what we're chartered to do. This entails 
gathering evidence of usage. But the problem is that the evidence that 
exists is from earlier work. What's being done now might be too new and 
we may not be able to gather that implementation evidence. That would be 
a pity but it's better than a bad design driven by process. SSN has a 
reputation for being too complicated so let's not hesitate to simplify it.

4. The published document states clearly that SOSA is the core and that 
SSN is an outer ring, with O&M and Dolce Ultra Lite alignments outside both.

5. There is a debate about whether the alignments, especially with O&M, 
should be normative. In favour: O&M is a formal standard and it feels 
right to me that it should be but I'm open to persuasion either way.

6. There is a debate about whether the SOSA-SSN relationship should be 
couched as sub classes/properties or whether one should be an extension 
of the other. That's a legitimate technical argument. Over to you to 
sort it - but as a design principle, please don't have the same 
property/class names in the two namespaces with different semantics 
(ssn:Platform and sosa:Platform, for example). My instinct is to prefer 
direct usage over sub classes but that's a generalist's view.

7. There is work going on concerning the SOSA-SSN alignment that is 
being shared piecemeal, issue by issue. That is not right. Put it on the 
wiki or GH, argue about it, edit it in front of everyone. The idea of 
"we'll share it when it's finished" is not the way we should work.

8. There is a lot of unhappiness in the SSN group at the moment, which 
is unfortunate and needs to be fixed before everyone walks away.

9. If the group so wishes, we can easily arrange a one off long telco.

Phil.


[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-sdw-wg/2017Jan/0096.html

-- 


Phil Archer
Data Strategist, W3C
http://www.w3.org/

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

Received on Wednesday, 25 January 2017 09:40:41 UTC