Re: RDF Interface specification

Adrian, everyone

Thanks very much for this. As ever, if we can help we will. The barrier 
to setting up a chartered WG (i.e. on that can create formal standards) 
is pretty high, but (I hope) not insurmountable. In essence we need to 
be sure that sufficient members are committed to participating in the WG 
and that the spec will be implemented. That means we need:

- member support (membership counts);
- implementation capacity.

Both of which flow from the demands of multiple stakeholders.

Now... RDF Interfaces looks like it might be in scope for something I'm 
trying to cook up. The Data Activity is all about bridging technological 
communities, making sure that, for example, non-SemWeb people (I know 
it's hard to believe but there are such people ) can benefit from 
semantics. In *that* context, I'm trying to find a path towards a WG 
sometime next year that will help us move from data to APIs, tools, 
frameworks etc. Markus Lanthaler's work on Hydra is relevant, as is the 
Linked Data API, Linked Data Fragments and more.

So perhaps you can help me to help you.

Leaving aside the fact that we're stretched to breaking point in terms 
of staff availability ... I'm looking for ways in which we could 
establish something like a Semantic Web (or Linked Data) Access Group - 
basically a group that defines a bucket full of stuff that means even 
arch anti-Linked Data people will find useful and attractive. Something 
that might bring SemWeb closer to Robin Berjon's vision 
(http://berjon.com/web-2024/). I don't agree with his statements about 
RDF, of course, but he's far from alone in his thinking.

Do you think that might be worth pursuing? And, if so, would RDF 
Interfaces fit within that??

Comments, positive or negative, all welcome.

Phil.

-- 

Phil Archer
W3C Data Activity Lead
http://www.w3.org/2013/data/

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

On 02/07/2014 16:19, Nathan Rixham wrote:
> Glad to see the work didn't go waste, and I wish you the best of luck
> moving forward with the project.
>
>>From my personal standpoint, RDF Interfaces was considered finished and
> informally reviewed by timbl, pending any changes which would need to be
> made after RDF 1.1 - although I tried to pre-guess them and keep it
> compatible both forwards and backwards. you will know yourself what is
> required, if anything.
>
> Regarding being javascript specific, the original spec was oriented towards
> js, but also catered for other languages, to ensure this I implemented it
> in PHP as a side project whilst creating the spec. The specifications map
> to WebIDL, and WebIDL maps to other languages.
>
> IMHO the real value is in implementation and usage, where you have both
> excelled. Kudos.
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Adrian Gschwend <ml-ktk@netlabs.org> wrote:
>
>> hi group,
>>
>> For about two years the RDF Interfaces spec is in limbo:
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-interfaces/
>>
>> It states:
>>
>> "This document is not finished. Due to the lack of time, the RDF Web
>> Applications Working Group was unable to complete work on this document
>> before the end of their charter. At the time of publication of this
>> document, it was not known whether W3C will continue this work on the
>> Recommendation track in another Working Group. While a significant
>> amount of design work went into this document, at present there are no
>> known implementations of the specification. A number of design issues
>> have not been completely resolved. Developers wishing to implement this
>> API should be aware of incomplete nature of the specification."
>>
>> However, in the JavaScript world RDF Interfaces is by now the base for
>> quite some projects and gets ongoing development by multiple developers.
>> There are at least 3 implementations available.
>>
>> Last week Thomas Bergwinkl announced some new JavaScript libraries and
>> applications which build heavily on top of RDF Interfaces.
>>
>> Announcement:
>>
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfjs/2014Jun/0008.html
>>
>> Followup with motivations:
>>
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfjs/2014Jul/0001.html
>>
>> He also proposes a new specification called RDF-Ext [1][2], which
>> extends RDF Interfaces with a store interface, async parsers &
>> serializers and an ES6 Promises interface.
>>
>> The question now is what would be the best way to work on those
>> specifications. Currently it is published on a github page and the
>> content is residing in a github repo.
>>
>> Is it the idea of W3C to standardize specifications which are more or
>> less language dependent? While RDF Interface never clearly stated it, it
>> is heavily oriented on JavaScript syntax and for that reason it most
>> probably won't be implemented in other languages. The same is true for
>> RDF-Ext. However, Thomas and I are interested in making it "official",
>> in case the group thinks that this makes sense.
>>
>> I initiated the RDF JavaScript Community Group [3] for that reason so we
>> would also offer to take over both RDF Interfaces and RDF-Ext
>> specification development, if this makes sense.
>>
>> comments would be appreciated
>>
>> regards
>>
>> Thomas & Adrian
>>
>>
>> [1]: https://bergos.github.io/rdf-ext-spec/
>> [2]: Implementation of it: https://github.com/bergos/rdf-ext
>> [3]: http://www.w3.org/community/rdfjs/
>>
>>
>

Received on Thursday, 3 July 2014 08:21:40 UTC