RE: RDF Syntaxes 2.0

Hi Jeremy!

Jeremy Carroll wrote:

>On TTL
>
>I would have thought that if we decide to have another RDF WG, turtle
>would be a candidate for an attempt on the W3C speed record from opening
>the WG to Rec .... e.g. month1 FPWD, month 2 LC, month 3 PR.

Isn't this a little bit too optimistic? I think I remember some initial
ideas about a very rapid OWL working group (of a year or so), backed by the
fact that, at that time, there has already been a pretty complete and
good-quality set of member submissions? But you know that things went
differently.

Specifically for Turtle, I do not really believe that everything will work
out that easily, only because there already exists a team submission,
because there has been some substantial criticism on the document, e.g.:

  <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Jan/0128.html>

I would believe that a future RDF WG would have to take comments like these
into account, before being able to create a Last Call document. And, after
the latest RDF thread in the SWIG list, I do not have the feeling that there
is much consensus on any of the features that have been discussed. I rather
think I have heard different opinions for most of them. So this looks to me
as if a lot of discussion will have to take place in a WG, before one can
even start drafting anything. Frankly, I think that, after one or two
months, the WG will be happy if it has managed to settle on how to organize
their issue list. ;-)

Please don't get me wrong, I do not talk against bringing Turtle on Rec
track here (actually, I do not have an opinion on this yet). I'm just having
serious doubts about the time line you suggest.

Apart from this, it doesn't make much sense to me to have some RDF
serialization in PR before having the abstract syntax / data model, on which
it depends, in its final form. For example, the WG may discuss whether to
allow for some form of generalized RDF (bNodes and/or literals in more or
all positions of a triple) or to keep with all the syntactic restrictions of
RDF 1. At least, Rec track serializations should follow this decision, i.e.
they should neither allow for more general RDF (would be unjustified) nor
for less (would prevent expressing all of RDF). 

So a W3C Recommendation for Turtle can hardly be published earlier than the
core of the RDF spec. And by the "core spec" I refer to the RDF abstract
syntax, the RDF vocabulary (the normative set of RDF(S) URIs such as
"rdf:type"), and the RDF semantics.

Cheers,
Michael

--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
Research Scientist, Information Process Engineering (IPE)
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Email: michael.schneider@fzi.de
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Received on Monday, 25 January 2010 21:39:45 UTC