Re: Requirements for a possible "RDF 2.0"

2010/1/13 Chris Welty <cawelty@gmail.com>:

> I suppose we don't really need to discuss whether we should investigate an
> "RDF 2.0", but rather what kinds of requirements various RDF users have that
> they would like to be considered

Personally I don't think the time is right for an "RDF 2.0"
(suggesting a major overhaul), though an "RDF Second Edition" (as Jiri
suggests) may be desirable.

There's still a large amount of consolidation work needed (notably
with the recent arrival of RDFa, OWL2 and RIF), and probably more
significantly there aren't any major technical blocks to widespread
deployment based on the current specs - i.e. if it ain't broke, don't
fix it. If there are such problems, then let any spec changes be
driven by real-world use cases rather than change for change's sake.

Having said that, there are a few areas that could probably use
attention given developments since the 2004 specs -

Out:
* containers (Bag, Alt, Seq) - quiet deprecation would probably be the
best bet, supported by clear instruction on how to use Lists

* reification - ditto, with named graphs as the modern alternative

both features can cause a lot of confusion, seeming more useful than
they actually are

In:
* improved support for named graphs - essentially bringing the
constructs included in SPARQL back into RDF core (including support
for named graphs in RDF/XML, done in a manner that would be
backwards-compatible if at all possible)

* W3C-blessed subsets of the model & syntax - on the model side, e.g.
a profile that excludes blank nodes, on the syntax side e.g. a profile
that uses the triple-shaped rdf:Description style of RDF/XML
(basically I reckon it's too late to make breaking changes to RDF/XML,
but it still remains a significant hurdle for newcomers)

* an RDF/XML profile (as above) designed for maximum compatibility
with XPath/XSLT/XQuery

* a JSON syntax (the recent work by Jeni Tennison et al should inform this)

* GRDDL/JSON (maybe more appropriate as part of a GRDDL 1.1)

Just to reiterate, these are all incremental-addition kind of things,
suggesting RDF Second Edition (or v 1.2), no namespace changes
required.

Though not actually part of the RDF spec effort itself, it would be
good to see a mapping for *every single* W3C format to RDF/XML (with
GRDDL coverage).

Cheers,
Danny.







-- 
http://danny.ayers.name

Received on Thursday, 14 January 2010 09:06:14 UTC