Re: ISSUE-175 draft response

I support this proposal

Regards,

Alistair

On Tue, Dec 02, 2008 at 12:12:59PM +0000, Sean Bechhofer wrote:
>
>
> All,
>
> Here's a draft response to Jeremy on [ISSUE-175].
> Let me know what you think. Note *this is just a draft, not the actual 
> response* -- I'll wait for feedback from the WG before replying formally.
>
> 	Sean
>
> Dear Jeremy,
>
> thanks for your comment [1]:
>
>     *  The URI of the SKOS namespace. The current draft introduces a new
> namespace for the SKOS vocabulary. Comments have been made that this may 
> cause
> difficulty for existing SKOS implementations or vocabularies. As a  
> result, the
> choice of SKOS namespace should be considered "at risk of change".
>
> Any implementators using a namespace URI in a WD have been warned of  
> possible
> change before Rec.
> Conventionally this means that the terms in the namespace or their  
> meaning might
> change, and the namespace URI remains unchanged. So if I had been part of 
> the WG
> when the namespace URI changed, I would have been opposed, however  
> that's water
> under the bridge and the argument cuts both ways!
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This was an issue that has been debated at length in the WG (see for  
> example [2,3]) and the WG have seen merit in both options. The Last Call 
> Draft proposes a new namespace. Recent discussions [4] have seen the WG 
> return to a position where the SKOS vocabulary would be defined using the 
> existing namespace URI.
>
> We do not intend to change the property names of the key semantic  
> relations skos:broader and skos:narrower, as it was felt that this would 
> effectively negate any benefit from retaining the namespace. This will, 
> however, result in a change to the semantics of these relationships. 
> However, as highlighted in [5], in principle applications should be able 
> to make use of the machine-readable published schema. There may be impact 
> on previously published vocabularies, which users will need to be made 
> aware of. Note also that "old" vocabulary (for example skos:subject) will 
> no longer be defined in the skos namespace. Historical versions of the 
> schema will, however still be made available (although not at the SKOS  
> namespace URI).
>
> Our proposal is thus to revert to the original SKOS namespace URI, and to 
> add an appendix to the reference document (see [6]) discussing the issues 
> above.
>
> Are you happy with this solution?
>
> Cheers,
>
> 	Sean Bechhofer
> 	Alistair Miles
>
> [ISSUE-175] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/175
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Oct/0077.html
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Apr/0032.html
> [3] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SkosDesign/RdfSchema
> [4] http://www.w3.org/2008/10/07-swd-minutes.html#item05
> [5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Oct/0036.html
> [6] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/SKOS/reference/20081001/#app-namespace
>
>
> --
> Sean Bechhofer
> School of Computer Science
> University of Manchester
> sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk
> http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/bechhofer
>
>
>
>

-- 
Alistair Miles
Senior Computing Officer
Image Bioinformatics Research Group
Department of Zoology
The Tinbergen Building
University of Oxford
South Parks Road
Oxford
OX1 3PS
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1865 281993

Received on Tuesday, 2 December 2008 14:35:00 UTC