POWDER last Call

Hi,

This is not a new announcement, rather a "let's just check that relevant
people got the message" e-mail to the widest SW community.

In this e-mail:
  - Outline of POWDER, key things for the SW community
  - Invitation to an outreach event in 2 weeks' time at
    Yahoo!'s Mission College campus, Santa Clara
  - Pointers to some tools under development

POWDER outline
==============

The POWDER WG (Protocol for Web Description Resources Working Group) has
announced Last Call on its draft documents, of which there are 3 in all. 
POWDER allows you to associate descriptions with multiple, resources and 
  for those descriptions to have an explicit provenance (so that you can 
use a variety of methods to gain trust in the data).

POWDER has two unusual features. First, it comes in two flavours - an 
operational, (hopefully) simple XML format known simply as POWDER. Put 
that through a GRDDL transform associated with the POWDER namespace and 
you get the semantic version (known as POWDER-S) which creates an OWL 
class to represent the description, and another OWL class to represent a 
set of IRIs. By making the latter a sub class of the former, all IRIs in 
the set are described.

Doing this requires a semantic extension (defined in the formal 
semantics document) that confers membership of a class on a URI if it 
matches a regular expression.

There are 3 Rec Track documents in all:

  - POWDER: Description Resources (what is a DR? How to create one etc.)
  - Grouping of Resources (how to define a set of IRIs)
  - Formal Semantics (the underpinning of the whole thing).

In addition, first public working drafts are available of our Primer and 
Test Suite. All these are, of course, available from the WG homepage 
[1]. The Last Call period is set to run until 14th September.

Fabien Gandon has created some excellent slides that illustrate what 
POWDER is about 'in a nutshell'[2]

To Do:
  - Imminently: update the XML schemas and RDF vocabulary namespace 
documents

  - Very soon: publish a non-normative XSLT that effects the GRDDL transform

Invitation
==========
If you're in Silicon valley this month, join us for a free buffet lunch 
and introduction to POWDER. Details at [3].

Tools under construction
========================
A POWDER validator is under construction at [3] and there's a handy tool 
for seeing how the Grouping of Resources system works at [4]. Neither is 
officially sanctioned by the WG (as yet anyway)

Cheers

Phil
(POWDER WG chair)

[1] http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/
[2] http://www.slideshare.net/fabien_gandon/slideshows
[3] http://keg.icra.org/cgi-bin/pdrvalidate.cgi
[4] http://www.fosi.org/powder-group-tester/

-- 
Phil Archer
Chief Technical Officer,
Family Online Safety Institute
w. http://www.fosi.org/people/philarcher/

Register now for the annual Family Online Safety Institute Conference
and Exhibition, December 11th, 2008, Washington, DC.
See http://www.fosi.org/conference2008/

Received on Tuesday, 2 September 2008 14:47:28 UTC