Re: Request for feedback about RDF-star

I tend to side with the arguments in the minutes for a new namespace.
Whatever the semantics settle out to be, they will be sufficiently distinct
from RDF for a namespace to highlight that distinction.

On Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 2:27 AM Pierre-Antoine Champin <
pierre-antoine.champin@ercim.eu> wrote:

> 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
>