Re: Face to Face Objectives

On Thursday, June 21, 2001, at 09:14  AM, Brian McBride wrote:

> Face to face time is rare and extremely valuable.  We should 
> take care to
> make the most of this opportunity.  So as well as making sure 
> we have some
> fun, I would like to suggest that we set ourselves some goals 
> for things
> we'd like to accomplish by the end of the face to face.

I definitely agree, but I'm having some trouble deciding what we 
should do with it. I'm not sure that the work we've been doing 
so far is enough to set up the meeting to be maximally 
productive. Things that I'd imagine to be most productive would 
be:

  - Build a foundation: Try to clarify terms, goals, hopes and 
dreams for the group so that we have a stronger foundation for 
the work we do after the F2F is over.
  - Have an issue bash: everyone brings an issue with them and a 
proposed solution and we go down the issues list trying to 
resolve as much as we can.
  - Have a spec-designing party: Once we've finished most of the 
issues, we can throw our heads together to organize something on 
paper.

All of these things of course take preparation in advance, and 
so it's important to decide what we're doing now so that the F2F 
can be the most productive.

> That by the end of the face to face we have:
>
>   o agreed an abstract syntax with at least the expressive power of
>     n-triple and defined its semantics

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. If we're going to agree on an 
abstract syntax, that implies resolving a lot of the abstract 
syntax issues. I don't see the point of doing work on something 
that is subject to change based on issue resolution.

Second, why are we taking n-triple as a base? We agreed to it 
for use in our discussions, I don't remember agreeing that it 
represented a minimum-necessary set of abstract syntax.

Finally, I'm still a bit fuzzy on how we "define its semantics". 
I'm (obviously) not a logician, so any help on clearing up the 
process and results here would be greatly appreciated.

>   o resolved all outstanding issues with RDF schema

There are 14 open issues with Schema. This seems to imply that 
all those issues are placed on the table for proposing 
resolutions. I have no problem with this, I just want to make 
sure we're clear. I think it would work best if we all bring our 
proposed resolutions with us.

Also, I'm not sure that we can do both this and the one above at 
the same meeting -- it seems like a bit more than we can chew in 
two days... but maybe I'm underestimating us.

>   o decided how we will define RDF/XML (BNF, XML Schema?, DTD?, other)
>     and its transformation (XSLT, other?) to n-triple

Since these are reasonably arbitrary, political decisions, I 
think these are a great thing to resolve at a F2F! Good 
suggestion.

Again, I'm not sure that all three of these will fit in a 
two-day schedule.

> and within two weeks of the end of the face to face we have 
> documented the
> first two of these decisions in WG drafts.

That may be asking a lot, especially with schema. I also hope 
that the drafters take into careful consideration our 
partitioning of the problems space and the draft space (which 
would be a nice thing to agree on by the F2F's end). Also, are 
the drafters going to become the editors of the spec? If so, I 
think that we should probably choose them before the F2F is 
through.

--
[ "Aaron Swartz" ; <mailto:me@aaronsw.com> ; <http://www.aaronsw.com/> ]

Received on Thursday, 21 June 2001 11:54:26 UTC