Re: vCard - Old vs. New?

> The problem with Member Submissions and W3C Notes is an unclear update
> mechanism and a lack of maintenance. Vocabs will evolve, and I'm not
> sure if the "Rec" model really works for them. The "Note" model works
> even less, with the "Note" being published once and then generally
> sticking around forever. Some modification of the "Rec" model that's a
> bit more loose will probably work.

Why more loose?  It seems to me that if folks are going to invest
heavily in an ontology, they don't want anyone playing fast-and-loose
with it.  To put it differently, if I were building my business around
an ontology, I'd want something very much like the W3C
Recommendation-Track Process to govern its evolution and makes sure no
one recklessly broke it.

That said, many ontologies are not at that stage yet.  Specs aren't
suppposed to reach Recommendation until there's something rather like a
global consensus on them.  At earlier stages, something like a
succession of Working Drafts makes a lot more sense.

Or, maybe there's a completely different appoach.  I've been wondering
lately whether the current state of the net (cf crowdsourcing) hasn't
rewriten the foundational notions of IT standards.  For data formats and
their underlying ontologies, maybe it's now practical/sufficient/best to
have dyanmic translation shim code between the different ones, and let
them all bloom.  I think this might work, but it's somewhat less proven
than the W3C Recommendation-Track approach (which is unproven for
ontologies, but seems to work pretty well for data formats in general.)

      -- Sandro

Received on Monday, 11 May 2009 17:12:20 UTC