Re: Conformance to EARL

On Wed, 25 May 2005 16:41:38 +0200, Shadi Abou-Zahra <shadi@w3.org> wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>> I don't think so. I think we should specify that things like producing   
>> "valid EARL plus other made-up EARL" as non-conformant behaviour,  
>> since  this can harm interoperability (less so because EARL is RDF and  
>> not XML,  but is still a bad idea).
>
> In several areas, it makes sense to extend a core EARL with domain  
> specific vocabulary. For example, I want to use mycompany:toaster as an  
> earl:subject (I am testing toasters for their ergonomy and want to  
> record my findings in machine readable format).

Sure. The proposed requirement was that they create their own namespace  
for it, and not make up some property and put it in the EARL namespace.  
Formally this is quite difficult to specify in RDF, and RDF does nothing  
to stop other people from making up a name in any namespace they like  
(including the RDF basic syntax namespace) and using it. This constraint  
on tools would ask them to check that people are not doing this, so that  
the EARL group decides for themselves what is in their namespace as far as  
possible.

One of the reasons for using RDF is precisely that it is easy to extend -  
for example the "partial" value for validity that Sidar uses. I recently  
saw a test results page that has several values for fail - "almost",  
"partially", "buggy", ...

I don't know that we need to rush to include these, but if we want to then  
it is helpful to ensure that other people are not making up terms in the  
namespace and using them in deployed tools, to the extent that we can.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                              chaals@opera.com
          hablo español - je parle français - jeg lærer norsk
   Here's one we prepared earlier:   http://www.opera.com/download

Received on Wednesday, 25 May 2005 15:19:26 UTC