RE: Request for feedback about RDF-star

I worked ok for JSON-LD.   If not adding a lot (says below "a new IRI", so just 1?), I'm ok with adding to RDF ns.

+1

From: Pierre-Antoine Champin <pierre-antoine.champin@ercim.eu>
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2021 5:21 AM
To: Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
Subject: 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#<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