discussion strawman: RDF Data Model Summary

So Bill beat me to it [1], but when I saw James' request this morning I
though 'about time we had a go at this' too. 

		http://www.w3.org/2000/09/rdfmodel/
		Resource Description Framework: Data Model Summary
		an RDF Interest Group Discussion Document

I feel the need to pepper this with disclaimers. It's a quick evocative
hack, the editing is not the work of any W3C Working Group, and the
organisation of the contents quite likely leaves much to be
desired. Really, this is a subset of the M+S REC without thinking through
how such a document should best be organised. 

I'm circulating this as-is in the hope we'll collectively get some sense
of whether there's enthusiasm and resources for progressing this work
here or in some future W3C Working Group. The job, informally
characterised, is that of extracting the core RDF Model
from the M+S 1.0 REC, and figuring out where, if at all, it needs
clarification and/or refinement. My personal opinion is that any effort to
come up with an improved RDF syntax, or bugfixes for the RDF 1.0 XML
grammar, will need to have a clean sense of where syntax stops and model
starts.

BTW, after I took scissors to the M+S spec, this is what happened to the
filesize:

 rdfmodel]$ ls -l Overview.html OriginalREC.html
 -rw-rw-r--    1 danbri   www        138906 Sep  8 07:45 OriginalREC.html
 -rw-rw-r--    1 danbri   www         28204 Sep  8 09:45 Overview.html  


I'm not sure where to go with this, but since the notion of a Model-only
version of the core RDF spec has been raised a number of times, it seems
worth having something visible to play with.  Even if (as is true of 
http://www.w3.org/2000/09/rdfmodel/ ) it's a first-pass hack.

I should also say that I've huge admiration for what the Model and Syntax
Working Group and Editors achieved in http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
and this was only strengthened as I revisited M+S this morning...

I think doing a simple job of showing what a model-only spec might look
like is pretty easy; I lack any sense for how long it would take us to do
the full thing.

Views on where (if anywhere) to go with this stuff gratefully
received. There are only so many hours in the day and having opened the
book on RDF issue tracking (not to mention the XGraph scrapbook) I'm
wondering how much folk here would value a model-only doc...

Dan

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Sep/0069.html

Received on Friday, 8 September 2000 10:57:09 UTC