On a possible role for the applications and demos task force

At the tech plenary there was a lot of support for the WG doing something in
the area of applications and demos.  I'd like to start a discussion around
what such a task force might do.  I hope this will stimulate others to
propose their own, no doubt different ideas and as the scope of the work
becomes clearer a task force leader may emerge.

A key objective of the WG is to encourage deployment of the semantic web.  I
suggest that a useful thing for the applications/demos WG to do is to
provide simple examples that users can adapt to their own needs.  This is in
the spirit of the early days of the web, when, it is said, folks were
encouraged to put up web pages because they could take an existing web page
and adapt it to meet their needs.

The idea I would like to float is that that the Applications and Demos task
force (ADTF) should not set out to develop applications and demos on its
own, but might produce a framework for collecting demos and illustrations
developed by other task forces.

For example, consider the "explain the mess" task force.  I imagine it might
produce a document that explains when to use RDF, RDFS, OWL-lite, DL and
Full.  Might it not also aim to produce illustrative examples of each of
these uses.  Similarly, I'd expect there to be examples of the output from
the RDF in XHTML task force, perhaps examples of the use of a wordnet
ontology, and design patterns, ... And topic maps and ...

In RDFCore, and I think also in Owl, when there was an issue and a decision
was made, one or more test cases were produced to illustrate that decision.
I am suggesting that analagously in Best Practices, when a best practice is
produced, it should not only be described in a document, but one or more
illustrations of that practice should be produced.  Ideally such
illustrations will be easily adaptable by folks to their own needs.

Brian

Received on Thursday, 25 March 2004 05:34:21 UTC