- From: Sean Bechhofer <sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 17:05:34 +0000
- To: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
- Cc: SWD Working SWD <public-swd-wg@w3.org>
Dear Tim, thanks for your comment [1]: Reading http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-skos-reference-20080829/ , I sympathize very much with the people who want to keep the namespace the same. We're trying to get critical mass and cutting some of the data off and letting it float away by itself it is costly. I don't generate skos myself, but I have come across it. Some people think it's important. I strongly suggest giving new names (within the same namespace) to the five things which have changed, especially if they're rather obscure. You have of course to evaluate the damage if you were to just make an erratum to skos 2005. Did you in 2005 make a say about the change rules for skos 2005 I suggest to use new names and not change the namespace. ------------------------------------------------------------ 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-153] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/153 [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Sep/0084.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
Received on Tuesday, 2 December 2008 17:07:49 UTC