- From: Andy Seaborne <andy@seaborne.org>
- Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2018 22:34:40 +0100
- To: semantic-web@w3.org
On 16/10/2018 04:04, Eric Miller wrote:
> [[
> Regarding mailing lists, I would encourage the W3C team to leave this
> one (semantic-web@) alive, alongside public-lod@, and then we can use a
> new rdf-dev@ list bonded to the CG for those who want to collaborate
> more closely, e.g. on W3C specs. But I think it's best left to Ralph,
> Ivan et al to make a judgement call on that, based on the responses in
> these threads.
> ]]
>
> +1. And thanks for sharing your story.
+1
>
> —e
>
>
>> On Oct 15, 2018, at 10:53 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com
>> <mailto:danbri@google.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> This is way overly long, sorry. I wrote down some pre-2001 RDF
>> history, since this community transition point is a good time to take
>> stock and remember SWIG/RDFIG and RDF-DEV things that we forgot to
>> record, before it is too late.
>>
>> On Mon, 15 Oct 2018 at 16:06, Melvin Carvalho
>> <melvincarvalho@gmail.com <mailto:melvincarvalho@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 16 Oct 2018 at 00:53, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com
>> <mailto:danbri@google.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 15 Oct 2018, 12:32 Ralph Swick, <swick@w3.org
>> <mailto:swick@w3.org>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 2018-10-15 11:09 AM, David Booth wrote:
>> > On 10/15/2018 10:49 AM, xueyuan wrote:
>> > > This message is to inform you that the Semantic Web
>> Interest Group
>> > > is now closed, [ . . . . ]
>> > > With the introduction of Community Groups we now
>> encourage the
>> > > participants in the IG forum to
>> > > establish Community Groups to continue the conversations.
>> >
>> > Given that the semantic-web@w3.org
>> <mailto:semantic-web@w3.org> email list has served the
>> community
>> > very well, I think it would be helpful for continuity if
>> a Community
>> > Group could take over the existing email list. Is this
>> possible? And
>> > if so, does this mean that we should now create such a
>> community group?
>>
>> Ivan and I have been in conversation with DanBri for some
>> time as the
>> formal closing of the Interest Group was pending. This
>> specific
>> question was part of that discussion; whether to continue
>> the big
>> semantic-web distribution list as a Community Group
>> resource or use the
>> opportunity to do some housekeeping.
>>
>> Ivan and I decided to let the community decide -- and
>> those discussions
>> are welcome on the list.
>>
>> And again, I can't overstate our appreciate to DanBri for
>> his gentle
>> facilitation of the discussions on this list, jumping in
>> as the IG chair
>> and list moderator only when it was critical to do so.
>>
>>
>> Thanks Ralph. I had hoped to propose a new followup Community
>> Group last week but got swept up in f2f discussions during the
>> ISWC conference.
>>
>> Both SW and Linked Data have rather prescriptive overtones
>> (1-star, 5-star, #-/ redirects etc.). My suggestion to Ralph,
>> Ivan and team was to go back to the original name we used
>> prior to creation of 1999's RDF Interest Group. It was
>> "RDF-DEV" originally, named in tribute to XML's now
>> decades-spanning XML-DEV community.
>>
>>
>> Linked data already has a list.
>>
>> I think changing the name of something that's been going a fair
>> requires some onus of the proposer to justify it.
>>
>>
>> We can potentially keep both semantic-web@ and public-lod@ but we
>> cannot take their existing membership and treat those unknown parties
>> as W3C Community Group members; the CG process doesn't work like that,
>> since there are various things to agree to when joining a CG. So the
>> suggest is a new lightweight rdf-dev@ Community Group, even with most
>> discussions staying at least for now on their current lists.
>>
>> Regarding the specific motivation, it would be good to look at.
>>
>> Prescriptive. Not sure what this alludes to. There have been
>> debates over different quality of data (1 star - 5 star) but
>> surely that is not only as expected, but as designed!
>>
>>
>> (The "1-5 star" viewpoint is one of several views on how to deploy RDF
>> at scale. There are other perspectives that shift burdens from
>> publishers to consumers, neither is wrong or right, just a landscape
>> of tradeoffs and compromises.)
>>
>> The semantic web gives you a protocol where one set of data can
>> interface with another. So the degree of plumbing goes from the
>> network, to the data. Instead of looking at packets you're
>> looking at data shapes. So isnt it only natural that data quality
>> becomes an increasing topic of interest.
>>
>> On the specific case of #-/ redirects, tatooed agents not
>> withstanding, this is simply a conversation about data shapes,
>> isnt it (maybe im using the wrong word there)? In some systems
>> the data model overloads the shape of data so that a URI points to
>> a document and class. This for some is a neat slight of hand, and
>> no future analysis is needed. For others the overloading causes
>> edge cases which are hard to resolve. The example I once gave is,
>> "I might like RIcky Martin's home page, but I might not lick RIcky
>> Martin". Isn't this the kind of discussion that is to be
>> encouraged as we start to learn to put data together, and learn
>> about interop?
>>
>> Final observation. I came to this community as a skeptic. For
>> many the term "rdf" doesnt mean much, but the term "semantic web"
>> is magic. Outsiders dont know what it does, they know it's
>> complex, too complex for them, but they also know it contains a
>> dark power, that if one day is unleashed, will be a game changer.
>> I think it's a mixed brand but a powerful one. Not heard enough
>> yet to feel like ditching it, but am open and interested.
>>
>>
>> (A few more general thoughts on SWIG/RDFIG and staying engaged with
>> our historical roots, now that I am typing on a computer with a keyboard)
>>
>> Firstly to respond on the naming point: not using a slogan as a
>> Community Group name is absolutely not the same as ditching it! We
>> will have many slogans, for many contexts. For better or worse,
>> "Linked Data" has come to be associated with certain very specific
>> notions of publication best practice for *public* RDF data, and
>> "Semantic Web" has acquired different overtones (("of dark powers?
>> :)). There is a common element to both, and that is the idea of having
>> a shared structured data model based around a graph abstraction. As a
>> shorthand for that idea in W3C circles, I think it's fair to just say
>> "RDF".
>>
>>
>>
>> For me personally, "Semantic Web" (https://www.w3.org/1999/11/SW/
>> https://www.w3.org/Talks/2001/12-semweb-offices/all.htm ... ) was
>> always and remains a project to improve the Web. You can see bits of
>> that history in the old public-but-obscure sw99 list,
>> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/sw99/1999OctDec/ and in the
>> research-funded efforts that the W3C Semantic Web team ran via MIT
>> (https://www.w3.org/2000/01/sw/) and in Europe via INRIA/ERCIM,
>> https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/
>>
>> Over time (2001-5ish?) some of us who had been building things around
>> practical applications (RSS, Dublin Core, Annotea, FOAF, Mozilla,
>> crawling, sitemaps, MCF etc.) began to feel a bit marginalized by the
>> direction of the "Semantic Web" slogan, in that conferences etc were
>> organizing around the notion of "Semantic Web as a scientific research
>> field" rather than as a shared endeavour to improve the Web. Simple
>> and useful applications began to look insufficiently researchy from a
>> scholarly perspective, and the later "Semantic Web" community tended
>> towards a fixation on rules/inference/ontologies as the centerpiece
>> technology rather than as a means to an end. At the same time the
>> influx of new participants certainly helped in lots of other ways,
>> bringing rigour (sometimes too much rigour:) to specs, adding
>> long-anticipated extras to RDF for ontology specification, etc.
>> Meanwhile, the approaches to hypertext linked RDF that some of us were
>> exploring around FOAF (and which borrowed from Mozilla/MCF ideas) was
>> crystalized with TimBL's Linked Data note and - boosted by the idea of
>> focussing on open data - https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData -
>> that effort became something of a second hub of W3C RDF-related
>> activity, for those whose interests were not primarily in the
>> logic/reasoning arena. Several practically minded RDF implementors
>> de-camped to the public-lod@ mailing list, the community became rather
>> divided into two clusters, and to some extent at least, "Semantic Web"
>> has drifted into being more of a topical research area than a shared
>> project to improve the Web. W3C stopped using the "Semantic Web" name
>> actively for new WGs some years ago. Most recently there have been
>> discussions about how graph databases (property graphs, gremlin etc.)
>> relate to W3C's existing portfolio of specs, and some engagement with
>> the emerging "Knowledge Graphs" perspective. My feeling from those
>> conversations, and especially from last week's excellent ISWC, is that
>> the different strands of activity are gradually re-converging, with a
>> broadly RDF-ish notion of graph data as the shared core, rather than
>> an over-riding emphasis on inference/ontology, or on particular (e.g.
>> LOD) publication patterns or requirements that all structured data
>> publishers must meet. Re-centering on the shared graph data model
>> absolutely doesn't preclude initiatives to find stronger consensus,
>> whether they are around query, OWL2, SHACL/ShEx, WebID/Solid, or the
>> never-ending quest for the perfect syntax. That's where I feel we are
>> today, but I wanted also to share some historical notes on how we got
>> here (as a cluster of efforts touching W3C via SWIG, RDFIG, RDF-DEV).
>>
>>
>> The first public RDF draft is 21 years old this month. See
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-rdf-syntax-971002/
>>
>> I met Ralph Swick and Eric Miller at the Dublin Core conference in
>> Finland that week in October 1997, alongside Dublin Core folk like Tom
>> Baker and Stu Weibel, having read this first public RDF draft on the
>> plane flight out, and asked them whether RDF's schema language would
>> be at least as expressive as MCF's, i.e.
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML/
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML/MCF-tutorial.html and
>> http://www.guha.com/mcf/wp.html ). They said that they thought so,
>> and I've been involved with the RDF effort in one capacity or another
>> ever since. In those days, W3C was patterned loosely after the X
>> Consortium, and all Working Groups operated in private, members-only
>> fora. When we started the RDF Interest Group in 1999 it built a year
>> or so's early adopter discussions on the RDF-DEV list,
>> http://web.archive.org/web/19990508122105/www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/rdf-dev/archive.html
>> ... that's the reason I'm proposing the otherwise quirky "RDF-DEV'
>> name once more.
>>
>> Not everyone here will remember RDF-DEV, and the archives are
>> currently offline except via Archive.org <http://Archive.org>
>> (although I'm trying to fix that). It might be a good moment to spend
>> a little time looking back on early RDF, and on RDF-DEV, as we take
>> stock of where we stand today.
>>
>> The RDF-DEV list was announced to XML-DEV and beyond back in June of
>> 1998,
>> http://web.archive.org/web/19991022011435/http://www.mailbase.ac.uk:80/lists/rdf-dev/1998-06/0000.html
>> http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199806/msg00414.html and our
>> special relationship with XML continues to this day. Many of the stars
>> of the XML world came eventually to dabble in RDF, and many early RDF
>> and Semantic Web discussions occurred in XML fora, notably XML.com
>> <http://XML.com> (e.g.
>> https://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/07/25/prologrdf.html or
>> https://www.xml.com/pub/a/98/06/rdf.html ) and sites like XMLHack.com
>> <http://XMLHack.com> or xmlfr.com <http://xmlfr.com/>,
>> http://xmlfr.org/actualites/tech/001208-0001 . We also wrote more in
>> IRC chats, blogs and email than we did for the scholarly record, and
>> many of those old sites are bit-rotting away.
>>
>> Looking at the first month's archive for RDF-DEV,
>> http://web.archive.org/web/19990508122105/www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/rdf-dev/archive.html
>> ->
>> http://web.archive.org/web/19990420005959/http://www.mailbase.ac.uk:80/lists/rdf-dev/1998-06/index.html
>> I am happy to say that many of the same folk are still involved (e.g.
>> I saw Ron Daniel at ISWC this week, Guha is a colleague at Google and
>> founder of Schema.org <http://Schema.org>). It is easy in 2018 to
>> forget how things were in those times. Not only was there no Google
>> Chrome, there was barely a Google
>> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Early_history) .
>>
>> Industry adoption discussions tended back then to centre around what
>> Netscape (the big browser of the early Web years) were doing, and
>> speculation or concern about whether Microsoft would engage
>> substantively with the RDF effort or not. I have long felt that our
>> tendency in this community effort towards repeatedly renaming things
>> (PICS -> PICS-NG -> RDF -> Semantic Web / Linked Data, ...) has
>> disconnected us from our own origin stories. While "RDF" might be a
>> terrible name, it is our terrible name, and it anchors things back in
>> a solid chain of cause-and-effect going back to the Web's younger years.
>>
>> Technically, the RDF approach owes a lot (even most) to MCF
>> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Content_Framework), and I suspect
>> that were it not for browser-war era politicking, we might today be
>> talking about W3C's 'Meta Content' rather then 'Resource Description'
>> Framework. That said, certain ideas were in the air more broadly, and
>> the RDF specs had other important ancestors alongside MCF. There was
>> PICS-NG, an effort to upgrade the PICS content labelling system to
>> cover more metadata usecases (see Ora Lassila's drafts,
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-pics-ng-metadata and nearby); this was
>> paired with efforts around W3C Digital Signature, with expectation
>> that dsig would be commonly used with PICS(-NG) "content labels".
>> There were also efforts around Dublin Core, which were often more akin
>> to requirements gathering. Beyond the initially quite basic DC
>> vocabulary you can see the origin of some of our concerns about
>> modularity and decentralization articulated as the "Warwick
>> Framework", an outcome of a 1996 Dublin Core workshop
>> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july96/lagoze/07lagoze.html - or see Michael
>> Sperberg-McQueen's note -
>> http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/03/19/info-factoring/ - on using
>> good old-fashioned logic to disentangle the different markup and
>> extensibility ideas that were bouncing around in Dublin Core community
>> discussions, again in 1996.
>>
>> Also of that era, the era that gave us RDF, is this semi-published
>> sketch of a W3C Note on link types -
>> https://www.w3.org/Architecture/NOTE-link.html . It references other
>> metadata syntaxes of those times, including SOIF (anyone remember
>> SOIF? see
>> https://www.w3.org/Search/9605-Indexing-Workshop/Papers/Hardy@Netscape.html
>> https://web.archive.org/web/19971221220012/http://harvest.transarc.com/ etc.).
>> Other formats/protocols included WHOIS++, as well as "IAFA Templates",
>> approaches to representing and indexing the contents of FTP sites
>> which some of us had begun to use for Web crawling, indexing,
>> cataloguing and data sharing -
>> https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/52/
>> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january98/01kirriemuir.html etc. Before even
>> RDF was created, there was a convergence focussed on W3C's Metadata
>> Activity that was beginning to bring together some of these metadata
>> efforts, combining digital library aspects with mainstream industry
>> adoption - for example see Jon Knight's article on Dublin Core and MCF
>> - http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7/mcf. Annotations and metadata
>> services were another common theme, with Marja-Riitta Koivunen leading
>> W3C's RDF prototype-based explorations ("Annotea"), which eventually
>> matured into the W3C Annotation standards. PICS itself always included
>> a labelling service protocol (https://www.w3.org/PICS/labels.html), as
>> well as a mechanism for content-filtering (or selecting) rules
>> expressed against those metadata labels. SPARQL was an eventual
>> migration of this idea to the RDF world.
>>
>> There were also pretty early Web discussions on querying RDF, and
>> those tended to have one foot in KR, one foot in databases, and a
>> third in digital libraries.
>> https://web.archive.org/web/19990423130239/http://www.w3.org:80/TandS/QL/QL98/pp.html
>> might be of interest to archaeologists, but I won't dig into that
>> topic here.
>>
>> Again in terms of ideas being "in the air", the efforts that fed into
>> the 1997 RDF initiative ("W3C Metadata Activity", led by Ralph Swick)
>> had ancestry in the Web itself, both in TimBL's original pitch within
>> CERN with its now famous diagram
>> https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html and talk of nodes and
>> arcs for question answering. The document that gave us the Web,
>> presented a very RDF-like diagramming style for linked information,
>> and said:
>>
>> "The sort of information we are discussing answers, for example,
>> questions like
>>
>> - Where is this module used?
>> - Who wrote this code? Where does he work?
>> - What documents exist about that concept?
>> - Which laboratories are included in that project?
>> - Which systems depend on this device?
>> - What documents refer to this one?"
>>
>> If you dig a bit further back (~ 9 years - thanks, Sean Palmer) you
>> can find TimBL's 1980 manual for the ENQUIRE system, which makes
>> similar observations: http://infomesh.net/2001/enquire/manual/#h2
>>
>> "The ENQUIRE system is designed to fill a gap in many current
>> documentation systems. A person finding himself faced with a piece
>> "xxx" of a system should be able to ask ENQUIRE, for example
>> What is xxx part of?
>> What is xxx composed of?
>> What must I alter if I change xxx?
>> What facilities does xx use?
>> Where do I find out more about xxx?
>> Who or what produced xxx?
>>
>> ENQUIRE does not aim to answer such questions as
>> How does xxx work?
>> What format is xxx in, exactly?
>> Why was xxx created?
>> What is the format of the interface between xxx and yyy?"
>>
>> Other "in the air" aspects of that era included the SHOE work
>> (https://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE/ and
>> http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE/piq.html), which explored
>> many of these themes and - again - bridged KR with the specifics of
>> 1990s Web technology.
>>
>> RDF worked as a standardization effort, despite its challenges, not
>> because it was super sophisticated, but because it was painfully
>> simple. It was in 1997/8 also a kind of Rorshach Test -
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test - in that different
>> communities looked at it and saw something rather familiar looking
>> back at them. Early internet technologists and hackers looked at it
>> and saw it as an evolution of metadata formats and protocols that had
>> already proved themselves, and which were suffering growing pains
>> around extensibility and modularity. Dublin Core folk saw a potential
>> answer to their need for practical answers on how to embed simple
>> catalogue records within Web pages, as well as a logic-oriented,
>> mappings-friendly underpinning that could help broker collaborative
>> agreements with nearby metadata communities around Education,
>> Multimedia, or Rights (
>> http://www.dublincore.org/news/2000/2000-12-06_press-release-e-learning-takes-important-step-forward/
>> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/bearman/01bearman.html
>> https://web.archive.org/web/20000925085014/http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/harmony/docs/abc/abc_draft.html
>> ...). Those more focused on policy aspects of 1990s internet also saw
>> a technological tool relevant to their social concerns, whether it was
>> issues around censorship, filtering, labelling technologies
>> (https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-PICS-Statement ...), privacy-oriented
>> efforts such as P3P, or the Web accessibility agenda, RDF looked ...
>> compellingly relevant.
>>
>> As 1997's RDF matured into the 1999 W3C "Model and Syntax"
>> recommendation (https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/ )
>> it also quite naturally attracted interest in the knowledge
>> representation and ontology world. Aside from RDF's MCF heritage which
>> drew in turn upon the Cyc project, the RDF approach looked familiar
>> enough to everyone working with logic-based representations. My
>> officemate Joel Crisp said of the first public spec "But that's just
>> Prolog!". He still says that. My later officemate Jan Grant explored
>> the point further by making a Javascript prolog engine that ran in the
>> browser (before JS was cool),
>> https://www.w3.org/1999/11/11-WWWProposal/rdfqdemo.html and which we
>> later explored integrating into Mozilla, alongside (thanks to Geoff
>> Chappell) the most robust SWI-Prolog engine
>> (https://www-archive.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/inference.html). While I am
>> namedropping former Bristol colleagues I should also mention Nikki
>> Rogers, who wired up RDF data sources into Coral (a deductive database
>> of that era), and Libby Miller, who amongst many many other things,
>> built upon a 1998 MSc project codebase implementing MCF from Larry
>> Franklin (now Permanent Secretary in the Government of Anguilla;
>> sometimes people move on from RDF). Libby implemented server-side in
>> her Java RDF codebase equivalents to various things that were in the
>> Netscape and Mozilla efforts of the time, including several RDF
>> sitemap format experiments which were effectively the ancestor to the
>> "RDFWeb" hyper-linked RDF approach that evolved
>> (https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/talks/xml2003/all.htm) into FOAF.
>>
>> It is also easy in 2018 to under-estimate the scale, importance and
>> impact of the Netscape and Mozilla efforts around RDF. The early
>> RDF-DEV archives linked above show discussions around the RDF/XML
>> markup in Netscape's Netcenter portal. Amongst other things their
>> initiatives included sitemap formats, the creation of RSS feeds (which
>> gave us RSS1, Atom etc.), large scale open data in RDF (DMOZ, the
>> DBPedia/Wikidata of its day, ChefMoz, ...). They also gave us a vision
>> of an RDF-capable Web browser
>> (https://www-archive.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/), whose stacked API of
>> super-imposed RDF data sources inspired many of the discussions around
>> W3C on APIs and RDF querying, and nudged us towards a healthy culture
>> for W3C RDF work of grounding standards work in technology ideas that
>> were already being explored and refined by implementors. For a while
>> Netscape's RDF sitemap (dublin core with extras) was served up with my
>> inline comments,
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20000816174920/home.netscape.com/netcenter.rdf
>> . This format is long gone and dead today, but it was the ancestor of
>> modern Linked Data.
>> Oh, Netscape the browser also pinged Netcenter on each new page visit,
>> and fetched an RDF/XML description of the page, which was used to
>> power their "what's related" UI.
>>
>> Why have I spent my evening digging up these rather long-lost
>> experiments, debates and proposals? These were the kinds of things
>> that we discussed in the RDF-DEV list in 1998-9, and the seeds of the
>> W3C Interest Group for RDF (RDFIG) which was created back in August
>> 1999
>> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/1999Aug/0000.html where
>> another horribly long email of mine -
>> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/1999Aug/0004.html -
>> introduced several themes of the era, including interop testing and
>> the (somewhat troubled) relationship with related efforts around XML.
>>
>> I didn't intend this mail to be a huge nostalgia trip or name-dropping
>> of friends from the late 1990s. There are many more important
>> contributions I've not listed; I won't attempt to name and list them
>> here. It is more that I have been realizing lately that the origin
>> myths around Semantic Web and Linked Data have disconnected it from
>> its actual historical roots. Please let nothing I've said here be
>> taken as a slight to, or undermining of, the amazing contributions and
>> important milestones that came after 2000/2001. For example, the
>> Scientific American article was a major milestone, TimBL's "Linked
>> Data note" and later TED talk was another. We have, through a lack of
>> institutional memory and history-writing allowed newer members of our
>> community to slip into seeing those milestones as the actual origins
>> of the RDF/SW/Linked Data work. This is a mistake that disconnects us
>> from how we got here, and can distort our thinking about where we go
>> next. RDF is a specific project, created under the umbrella of a
>> particular (if sometimes peculiar) organization, and it is a pity if
>> we lose track of that project now that it touches three decades. It is
>> a project intimately tied up with the larger Web project itself, and
>> one that deserves some kind of ongoing bridge between W3C the
>> organization, and W3C the wider network of communities of interest who
>> hang around here on mailing lists. And it is a project that was
>> substantially underway already in 1997-2000, and whose discussions in
>> those earliest years also formed the basis for many of the earliest
>> (and most useful) activities around W3C RDFIG/SWIG as a group.
>>
>> RDF of course is nothing terribly new as an approach to describing
>> things in a KR or logical manner, and many of its common themes and
>> challenges have been debated intensely for decades or longer. That is
>> the point of standards, to find and specify common ground rather than
>> to invent new things in a committee. Thinking of KR and picking from a
>> longer list, ... the "What's in a Link" paper
>> (http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a022584.pdf) dates from 1975.
>> "Shakespeare's Plays Weren't Written by Him, but by Someone Else of
>> the Same Name" (https://philpapers.org/rec/HOFSPW) dates from 1982.
>> These and others demonstrate a longer, larger KR/AI heritage dating
>> back before the Web, the Internet, and computing into the history of
>> Philosophy and logic. If you prefer a different heritage, you can
>> travel back in time through the library world, to the origins of
>> cataloguing, perhaps the Dewey Decimal and its early fork, the UDC
>> classification, or the Mundaneum (1912's idea of a search engine;
>> https://www.slideshare.net/danbri/schemaorg-and-one-hundred-years-of-search
>> ).
>>
>> This has been a very backwards-looking email, and probably a bit too
>> self-centered. I have been thinking about what kind of RDF/SW/etc
>> interest or community group I might still be excited to be part of in
>> another 10 or 20 years, and about many of our earlier contributors
>> whose work is all but forgotten today. And then, about lessons for RDF
>> in 2018?
>>
>> I think the first is that we are at our strongest when we build
>> bridges between different perspectives and work roles. RDF has roots
>> in KR, and strong links with academia/science, but also and equally it
>> has roots in hacker/opensource culture, in the user-centric values of
>> the library community, and in digital library, opensource and industry
>> initiatives to integrate information and make data available through
>> the use of simple standard metadata records. RDF has from the very
>> outset been grounded in the great technology-meets-society debates of
>> our time, and perhaps has had most traction when it was closest to
>> efforts at the core of the Web: browsers and search.
>>
>> Another example that feels quite core to the RDF mission (to me).
>> Twenty years ago Kjetil Kjernsmo and I were debating how best to use
>> RDF for rating online misinformation
>> (https://twitter.com/i/web/status/957841302070222854); this year we're
>> still discussing that (e.g. via http://schema.org/ClaimReview), but
>> we're also discussing data portability using shared schemas, data
>> shapes, and Solid/Inrupt. Part of the problem with RDF's adoption as a
>> technology is that it sometimes comes across as a bundle of burdens,
>> not just a simple technology standard. Adopters have sometimes
>> reported that they feel pressured by our community into jumping
>> through various hoops - whether around namespaces (use lots! don't
>> invent your own!), identifiers (always use them for every entity
>> mentioned, and re-use good ones!), reasoning (don't break it with
>> scruffy data), data (public, persistent, open, ...), HTTP headers etc.
>> But the community/society aspect can be a strength too. We are working
>> with a technology which is at its best when multiple over-lapping
>> datasets are superimposed, and for that to work well, there has to be
>> an element of community collaboration that goes beyond the strict
>> technicalities of the W3C specification.
>>
>> In those earlier years - especially the difficult period through 1999
>> through until the Semantic Web Activity was kickstarted in 2001 - the
>> RDF Interest Group was the place to be for RDF stuff. We even had a
>> few f2f meetups (https://www.w3.org/2001/02/rdfig-f2f/). As the
>> standards matured and conferences, journals and other fora arose, we
>> kind of stepped back and the list has become a lot quieter. I don't
>> think it needs to attempt to be in 2018/9 what it was in the 1990s and
>> early 2000s, but there may be values, themes and interests than
>> continue, and that deserve a home. Again in earlier times, RDFIG/SWIG
>> was an important focus for early (pre standardization even) interop
>> testing amongst RDF query/database implementors. It was where we
>> explored common schemas for things like calendar interop. It was where
>> Brian McBride led much of the issue-tracking work that later fed into
>> the RDFCore WG. It was where Alistair Miles and others took earlier
>> RDF Thesaurus designs
>> (https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/plan/workpackages/live/esw-wp-8.html)
>> and reworked them into the earliest versions of SKOS. In 2018,
>> starting fresh, all of these things would simply be independent W3C
>> Community Groups. 15-20 years ago, we didn't have that mechanism
>> available to us, and so everything was squeezed into one big (RDF/SW)
>> "Interest Group".
>>
>> In practical terms, is there a need for a successor to RDF-DEV, RDFIG
>> and SWIG? Perhaps not. W3C in 1997-1999 and the early 2000s was a
>> different place. In many ways the efforts of this community
>> trail-blazed W3C's subsequent opening up into public-participation
>> groups, through blogs, wikis, public logged IRC chat, collaborative
>> technology projects, and suchlike.
>>
>> That is in fact the reason for this week's SWIG shutdown. We have gone
>> from being ahead of our time (the rest of W3C opened up years later),
>> to being a kind of legacy historical anachronism, a glitch in the
>> spreadsheets. The W3C Community Group mechanism, in some ways a result
>> of our early experiments here with public participation, is just the
>> modern way of doing this kind of thing, and we should catch up with
>> the new mechanisms. It simply doesn't make sense any more to have a
>> public participation Interest Group on W3C's management books in 2018.
>> In addition, the new CG infrastructure, which many of us have already
>> been using for related groups, offers facilities that we don't have
>> for SWIG, including some IP commitments which make it easier to
>> produce W3C documents together, as well as useful tools like blogs.
>>
>> There are already a ton of W3C Community Groups on all kinds of topics
>> relating to the interests of folk here. You can check out the list at
>> https://www.w3.org/community/groups/ if you've not looked recently. It
>> is a relatively self-service mechanism, if you can get a small group
>> of interested parties together who'd like to have a group, the
>> bureacracy is pretty lightweight. That's what I'd like to do here with
>> the group that began as RDF-DEV, and which was RDFIG and SWIG for many
>> years.
>>
>> Ok, this mail is too long. I have filled out the proposal form for a
>> RDF-DEV CG,
>>
>> "RDF-DEV, for developments relating to W3C RDF, including
>> collaboration around applications, schemas, and past/present/future
>> related standards. Successor to SWIG/RDFIG."
>>
>> The list creation bot says "CONGRATULATIONS! RDF-DEV is now in our
>> list of proposed groups with you as the first supporter."
>>
>> See https://www.w3.org/community/groups/proposed/ for the link. I
>> promise not to send mails this long if the group goes ahead.
>>
>> Regarding mailing lists, I would encourage the W3C team to leave this
>> one (semantic-web@) alive, alongside public-lod@, and then we can use
>> a new rdf-dev@ list bonded to the CG for those who want to collaborate
>> more closely, e.g. on W3C specs. But I think it's best left to Ralph,
>> Ivan et al to make a judgement call on that, based on the responses in
>> these threads.
>>
>> cheers,
>>
>> Dan
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
Received on Wednesday, 17 October 2018 21:35:09 UTC