Request for feedback about RDF-star

Dear Semantic Web community,

as you may already know, an informal "task force" has been created in 
the RDF-DEV Community group [1], in order to produce a specification 
document for RDF-star (née RDF*) [2]. RDF-star extends RDF with native 
support for talking about RDF statements (as an alternative to standard 
reification), and already has a number of implementations. The goal of 
this work is to help ensure that all implementations are actually 
interoperable (which is not quite the case at the moment). Once this 
specification reaches a stable state, and provided that we get enough 
interest from RDF implementers and users, we will try to push it to 
Recommendation track.

We require your feedback on the following question. We aim to mint a new 
IRI to be used with RDF-star. In your opinion, is it 
acceptable/desirable to propose its inclusion in the RDF namespace [3], 
or should we instead mint it in a separate namespace? We could not 
really reach consensus in the group, hence we wish to get more opinions 
from the larger community.

We understand that, as a Community Group, we have no authority to 
/actually/ update the namespace (this would be done only by a future 
WG). But if we succeed in bringing this to a REC, changing from 
rdf-star:X to rdf:X at that point will be impossible in practice 
(remember the "0.1" part in FOAF IRIs?). And we also want to avoid 
repeating the confusing namespace dichotomy of rdf: and rdfs:. If we 
don't make it to a REC, this will mean that RDF-star is not widely used 
anyway, and so our "polluting" the RDF namespace will have had no real 
impact.

Some people in the group, on the other hand, feel that the RDF namespace 
should considered fixed (although other specs have already added terms 
to it [4,5]), or that the semantics of RDF-star is not stable enough.

The whole discussion can be found in the minutes of our call [6].

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

   pa


[1] https://www.w3.org/community/rdf-dev/

[2] https://w3c.github.io/rdf-star/cg-spec/

[3] http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#

[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-plain-literal/

[5] https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/

[6] https://w3c.github.io/rdf-star/Minutes/2021-03-12.html#t04