Best Practices Issue: RDF Format Discovery

Mark Birbeck and I are currently discussing RDFa document and
user-agent conformance over on public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf, and I think the
major issue that's raised in the following message is right in the
middle of the SWD WG's remit:

- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2007Nov/0065
Re: RDFa RFE: No Mandated DOCTYPE
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 11:53:39 +0000

The issue is: given a URI and no additional hints, what lengths should
a Semantic Web user agent go to to get triples from that URI? In the
RDFa case, I am questioning what sort of burden RDFa should put on its
user agents, given that its user agents are often going to be Semantic
Web user agents that have to deal with a whole lot of other things for
which there are no decent heuristics (pretty much i.e. GRDDL).

GRDDL in fact, however, leaves the door open enough for you, the SWG
WG, to fix, quite possibly. If you really want to take this to its
logical conclusion, it would be nice to have a vocabulary for
describing the capabilities of Semantic Web user agents to consume
various documents, a writeup of the heuristics that they ought to use,
and a kind of extra layer of conformance levels for Semantic Web user
agent authors to try to meet. "Don't wanna support all of GRDDL? Here
are a few common subsets that are well deployed."

This should be based on some level of description, looking to see what
kinds of documents people are actually using, and prescription, what
kinds would be good to produce especially in future when things like
RDFa go to rec. You'd also probably want to coördinate on that front
to make things as easy for RDF producers and consumers as possible,
though I understand that this is not a cross-review group (perhaps
something for the SWCG then).

The following is the bit of your charter that requires you to be
working on this:

"This deliverable specifies the most appropriate means to use HTTP to
access RDF schemas and OWL ontologies that are consistent with
Architecture of the World Wide Web (plus subsequent TAG findings)"
- http://www.w3.org/2006/07/swdwg-charter#sec2

But I don't really see this reflected in the current Best Practice
Recipes draft, and I'd love to see a proper tackling of it. Perhaps I
misunderstand what your charter means by "access": you only seem to be
concerned at the moment with serving RDF rather than consuming it.

Thanks,

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Thursday, 22 November 2007 12:27:31 UTC