In Solid apps, let’s stop using RDF terms that 404

In yesterday’s CG meeting we discussed how hard and slow it is to publish
RDF terms. While other semantic web practitioners may have a different
consideration of the trade-off, I proposed that we as the Solid project
should make sure that developers of Solid apps can always publish a new
term in at most 20 minutes.

There are a few terms that we been using without proper dev docs for months
or even years. Let’s make sure we fix those one by one.

For newly proposed terms let’s advise app devs and spec devs to publish
them at the same time they publish their app or spec, using something like
webId.org instead of leaving them undocumented for months or years, stuck
in unreviewed PRs or in unmaintained vocabs.

Of course, apart from publishing their terms, app and spec devs should also
publish their shapes and other data conventions.

Solid Data Modules, shape repos, inference and lenses can then help to
achieve interop.
But without dev docs for our RDF terms we can’t even start to properly work
on those.

We had a good discussion about this yesterday  with Pavlik, Jesse, Melvin,
myself, and other participants.

The hope is that this proposed new recommendation will lead to a better
developer experience and better interop between apps.

Is there anyone who couldn’t attend yesterday but would like to chime in
before we go ahead with this?

Cheers,
Michiel