Re: SW Best Practices WG - draft charter for discussion

I agree with Libby that 2-4 months is a very agressive timeline for producing
a Note in a community. (One person can do it in a week. But that means giving
up the value of collaborative work, which is significantly slower in most
cases).

It seems from reading the charter that the group is more heavily oriented
towards existing application developers than people who are wondering how to
get into RDF, although I think this is just a perception of the text.

If the goal is indeed to include helping reasonably intelligent web
developers to use semantic web technology, I suggest talking more explicitly
about enabling users to find existing vocabularies (ontologies) that they can
use as a goal, and using the word "ontologies"  less or clarify its meaning
the first time it is used.

I think it would be a good plan to detail more clearly the deliverables of
the group - otherwise it seems that the process which led to the formation of
the calendar task force from the RDF-IG could be at least equally effective
for forming particular task forces, and it becomes easier to determine
whether the proposed work is realistic given the resources.

An interesting aspect of work for this group might also be in the
visualisation and manipulation of Semantic Web information - although it is
unlikely that we could produce Recommendation Track work along these lines,
exploring different ways of representing the information to users might be a
great help in developing tools that people other than specialists can use
with comfort. One interesting aspect of this work is in developing
representations of queries, that can be formulated by people without learning
a syntax designed for a machine. While XML, N3 and so on are human-readable
by comparison to compiled java byte-code, they are still for the technically
inclined who are prepared to learn them - potentially excluding a vast number
of creators or users of RDF applications.

In general this seems like a realy good thing to be doing...

cheers

Chaals

Received on Thursday, 13 November 2003 18:21:36 UTC