Action: update Abstract and Status of the Document

Group:
In response to my action item recorded at:

http://www.w3.org/2009/01/28-er-minutes.html#action02]

here is a proposal for a rewritten abstract and for an amendment to the
Status section. Please let me know if this addresses the concerns we
discussed yesterday.

Abstract:

Access to the World Wide Web has meant access to many types of content,
including text, documents in a variety of formats such as the Open Document
Format (ODF) or Portable Document Format (PDF), audio or video clips, and,
of course, web content. Web content (e.g. XML, XHTML, and HTML documents),
like many types of content, usually has a structure that allows identifying
portions of the document in many ways. This specification will contain a
framework for representing pointers - entities that permit identifying a
portion or segment of a piece of content - making use of the Resource
Description Framework (RDF). It will also describe a number of speicific
types of pointers that permit portions of a document to be referred to in
different ways.  When referring to a specific part of, say, a piece of web
content, it is useful to be able to have a consistent manner by which to
refer to a particular segment of a web document, to have a variety of ways
by which to refer to that same segment, and to make the reference robust in
the face of changes to that document.

Status of this document:

To be inserted in place of:

[Editor's note: describe intent of this working draft and propose feedback
questions]

The intent of the initial public draft of this specification is to
introduce the Pointer Methods in RDF vocabulary, a collection of classes
and properties that can be used to identify portions or segments of
content, especially web content.  Keep in mind that this specification is
part of a larger suite of deliverables produced and maintained by the
Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group, but that it is meant to be
consumable as an independent vocabulary.  Feedback from the groups involved
in the W3C Semantic Web Activity (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/), especially
the Semantic Web Coordination Group, the Semantic Web Deployment Working
Group, the Semantic Web Interest Group, and the POWDER Working Group, would
be greatly appreciated.

Besides the issues described in the editor's notes throughout this
document, the group would apreciate feedback on:

1.  the extent to which the ERT WG is following best practices for the
description and publication of new vocabularies
2.  the practicality of the use cases suggested in section 1.3 as well as
other possible use cases not listed
3.  the use of RFC 2119 key words in the context of describing restrictions
on the usage of classes and properties
4.  other pointer methods not discussed by this document

Note: Shadi may want to add something about the semantic v. syntactic
conformance issue we've been discussing, but I didn't quite know how to
formulate that issue.

--> Mike Squillace
IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center
Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF) co-technical lead
http://www.eclipse.org/actf

W:512.286.8694
M:512.970.0066

External: http://www.ibm.com/able
Internal: http://w3.ibm.com/able