Re: swig telecons?

Dan makes many good points.

Telephony is not per se the answer.

However, in the event that people are very intersted in a specific issue, it
could on an occasional basis make sense for someone to give a brief informal
presentatino to kick off a discussion, and see what happens.

Lively mail discussions on hot topic are often informative, but the remain
thread often just sits there in an archive in a not very convenient manner.


Michael

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 6:21 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 1:54 PM, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:
> >
> > If we started having regular Semantic Web Interest Group telecons, would
> > you attend?   What would you expect/hope to get out of it?
>
> We did reserve the right to do this in the charter, a while back, but
> my take is that telephony isn't really the answer. What I feel is
> missing (despite the *millions*) that has been thrown at the Semantic
> Web brand, is the boring slog of getting the base tools and software
> polished. It's still too hard to get started solving practical
> problems with RDF, and for fairly uninteresting reasons. Big EU
> research grants don't easily get awarded for "help polish, package,
> test, transliterate and integrate RDF tools". Startups and corporates
> don't always find it easy to prioritise such activities either. And so
> we potter along, 13+ years into the RDF experiment, 'too big to fail'
> but (I sometimes fear) too slow to really seize the moment. Data is
> the flavour of the moment in the wider tech scene, but RDF is still
> too annoying to work with for many smart people.
>
> What I would value, is collaboration around getting tools into a
> situation where we can say "OK, a basic RDF toolkit will give you
> SPARQL vx, RDF/XML parsing, N3, GRDDL, RDFa, such-n-so .API, such-n-so
> OWL-ish stuff, such-n-so storage options, ...", and then point to a
> set of options for C, Python, Ruby, Java, Objective-C, C#, Prolog, etc
> etc. backed up by test cases, clear license statements, ... and
> packaged for Ubuntu and all the rest. Much of this stuff is nearly
> done, some tools are better packaged than others, but there's a hell
> of a lot out there in half-finished state and it makes things tough
> for newcomers to the scene who are just trying to get a job done.
>
> W3C's classic strengths are in defining standards rather than managing
> their deployment. On a good day 'the market' handles that. But
> sometimes markets need a helping hand. RDF's strength is that it is
> allows different groups to go about their data-creating business
> without needing heavy coordination. The downside might be related:
> things can easily end up a bit scattered. I think RDF's appeal will
> always rest with data, that we are fundamentally a community who are
> concerned with sharing, mixing and connecting data. The actual RDF
> technical stuff is as some put it sometimes a 'tax', but it is also
> the only way I know to date of doing this kind of data-mixing on a
> global scale...
>
> I didn't write a position paper for the RDF Future W/shop (yet), but I
> think in a nutshell my opinion is: don't expect new standards to be
> the answer. This can be difficult for W3C since all the organization's
> momentum is around being a machine for generating standards. I think
> collecting wishlists and draft project plans around tooling would be a
> good next step...
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>