Re: Request for feedback about RDF-star

+1

Am Fr., 26. März 2021 um 10:20 Uhr schrieb Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>:

>
>
> On Wed, 24 Mar 2021 at 09:25, 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.
>>
> My advice would be to do something new. Perhaps we could arrange for a new
> short memorable ns at W3C that could be used for this?
>
> It isn't clear at this juncture whether RDF-star is the seeds of the next
> generation of RDF, or a useful exploration. There are other approaches in
> the broad area (e.g. Wikidata's data model, labelled Property Graphs) and
> it is quite possible a future REC-track group might take another approach.
> So presuming upon official inclusion into the main RDF namespace seems a
> little presumptive of us, even if the hope is that things head in that
> direction. It could also feel like unfair on the W3C team to have us say
> "hey, millions of documents think that "foo" is in the rdf: namespace, how
> about making that true?".
>
> Maybe there is something that could be said in the implementation guide
> for software-creators to encourage it to be possible/easy to accept a
> future term that *is* in W3C's RDF ns?
>
> It's always been an awkward namespace btw, and is one of the oldest XML
> namespaces (the XML Namespace technology was designed at the same time, and
> not without controversies). One reason it is awkward is that it contains
> symbols that are used purely for the RDF/XML syntax designed back in 1997
> (rdf:Description), but also it is just horribly long and hard to remember.
>
>
>
>>   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
>>
>