Letting go and moving on...

Rather than seeing growing consensus in the past week
for either of the two proposals on the table, we now have
two new proposals on the table and a plethora of questions
as to how they compare to the earlier proposals and to the
requirements. 

I would like to suggest again that it does not appear likely to
me that this WG will achieve any form of strong concensus
on this issue, and that if a decision is forced, it will be one of
weak concensus, severe compromise, and for many made
out of exhaustion induced apathy. That is not a good context for
deciding on an issue which will have significant impact on
large numbers of present RDF users and impact all future
RDF based models and systems.

We have laid the conceptual groundwork for RDF datatyping and
provided a mechanism for explicitly datatyped literals. Of that the
WG has had nearly unanimous agreement. We should
defer the issue of inlined literals to a future WG.  This means that
no existing applications must change, and yet interoperability
can still be achieved for the time being by exporting graphs
with all application specific datatyping assumptions expressed explicitly
by datatyped literals when sharing knowledge with other
systems.

No, this is not the ideal final solution, bit it will work for now and
does not burn any bridges or close any doors to future research
and implementation experience that may be brought to bear
on future attempts to provide an answer to the question of
what inlined literals should mean in the RDF MT.

I ask again that this proposal be considered by the WG during
the telecon.

Patrick

Received on Friday, 4 October 2002 03:56:07 UTC