RE: discussion strawman: RDF Data Model Summary

Hi Brian,

On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, McBride, Brian wrote:

> > 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...
> 
> Speaking for myself, I would find a model only specification very useful,
> PROVIDED the result was a clarification of the model.  

My personal belief is that the description of the model does need some
clarification, and that the only feasible way of doing this is by
beginning to work on a document that takes the M+S REC's description of
the data model for starters. So the first piece of work is
largely mechanical: extracting the model portions of
M+S. Once that's done (and my quick hack this morning is only a crude
start in that direction), we can think about what kinds of clarification
might be in order. I hope the Issues doc and various contributed summaries
(thanks for the anon resources work btw) will guide us there. 

> We must ensure that we don't add to the confusion by having two documents
> telling different stories and folks not sure which to go by.  Any new
> document must be authoritative.  I'm not sure what that means in terms of
> w3c process.

Yes; the point of the various efforts this week is to start to remove some
of the confusion, not add to it. In the model-summary doc I think I've
been pretty careful (short of <blink> tags ;-) with the health warnings.

The RDF Model and Syntax document is a W3C Recommendation and remains as
such. No RDF Interest Group discussion document(s) can affect
that. Implementors should keep on implementing.

Regarding RDF syntax in particular, I do try to discourage folk here 
from talking about a 'new' syntax in ways that suggest our current syntax
might be depracated. Glitches aside it does the job, and was designed
from the outside to be one-of-many ways of exchanging RDF models. The
XGraph research notebook is a rough and ready scratchpad for ideas about
alternate XML graph serialization syntaxes that might relate to RDF.

Regarding W3C Process, the main I want to say at this point is that while 
a W3C Interest Group such as this is not the place to do Recommendation-track
work (that's what Working Groups do), we certainly can use the RDF IG to
work collaboratively on documents that refine our understanding of the
technology and specifications. These could/should set things up for
spec-oriented Working Groups to finish the job. If necessary we could
augment the main www-rdf-interest mailing list with other lists, IRC meetings,
occasional phoneconferences etc to this end. For now I think email's a
good way to proceed...

Dan

--
mailto:danbri@w3.org

Received on Friday, 8 September 2000 13:49:28 UTC