[VM] Telecon report, May 12

SWBPD Vocabulary Management Task Force telecon

2005-05-12, Thursday, 17:00 UTC

Present:  Tom Baker, Alistair Miles, Dan Brickley, Ralph Swick
Agenda:   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2005May/0070.html
See also: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2005May/0071.html
Log: http://www.w3.org/2005/05/12-swbp-irc

Next telecons:

    June 7, Tuesday, 1300 UTC
    June 21, Tuesday, 1300 UTC

General agreement: the cut-down proposal focuses on RDF
vocabularies. good to have this crisp focus.  However,
there is lots of good text in the Wiki document that should
not be lost.  DC/FOAF/SKOS have faced some common issues;
extracting from that experience is valuable.

Not everyone understands importance of maintaining stable URIs;
those kinds of concepts are important in the initial draft.

Alistair: when I hacked note - try to look from potential
user's point of view -- "what can I know from this"?  Let's say
the things that we definitely can say - and that is our scope!
Users are not interested in unsolved issues; they want to
know only what they need to know.  Most users say: tell me
what to do?

Danbri: Users of W3C technology sometimes end up feeling stupid
because they cannot figure out e.g., using XSLT with RDF.
So if there are tricky or unsolved problems, we should make
that clear.

Tom: ok to scope on what we know, but would like to push
a little beyond that -- salvage some of the points from
the evolving issues section of the Wiki draft, perhaps in
shorter form.

Ralph: sympathise re not exposing people to debates which only
give them a sense of some deep topic which they'll not find
an answer to.  At same time, people trying to use this stuff,
often get perplexed by things for which there is no answer.
We shouldn't be afraid to mention issues for which we've no
answers: "yes we know there's an issue, but we don't have
an answer".

Danbri: While we shouldn't scare people with academic stuff,
there are often some practical questions - what mime type
should I configure my server, can I put HTTP doc there and
content-negotiate, etc.  What to put at URI - if reader
clicks and gets something readable, etc.  Such as: "Where
the resources that are the members of an RDF vocabulary are
denoted by HTTP URIs, an HTTP GET request with the header
field 'accept=application/rdf+xml' against that URI should
return an RDF/XML serialisation of an RDF graph that includes
a description of the denoted resource."

Tom: Andy Powell has a nice paper addressing point 9d.
Would be useful to summarize in 2-3 sentences and cite other
documents like Andy's paper.  Not go much into "vocabulary
ownership".

Danbri: note that re SKOS, 'vocab ownership' proves complex
to talk about, even for one organization (w3c).

Danbri: is something like "keeping server software up to
date" SW Best Practice?  I found a web server at example.org
and example.com.  I am worried that there is an insecure Web
server that could be logging accesses to example.{com,org}.
Need to inform people of social policies around namespace
documents; e.g. changing your schema changes the interpretation
of existing documents.


-- 
Dr. Thomas Baker                        Thomas.Baker@izb.fraunhofer.de
Institutszentrum Schloss Birlinghoven         mobile +49-160-9664-2129
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft                          work +49-30-8109-9027
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany                    fax +49-2241-144-2352
Personal email: thbaker79@alumni.amherst.edu

Received on Monday, 16 May 2005 18:22:17 UTC