Re: SW Best Practices WG - draft charter for discussion

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

Charles,

> 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).

OK. I will make the timeline for task forces 2-6 months. Having said 
that, I think it would be good to focus on "low-hanging fruit": things 
that can realistically be achieved in a short time frame.

> 
> 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 use ontology and vocabulary more or less as synonyms. I agree that 
vocabularies are in practice very important for developing applications 
(cf. the SW Challenge presented at ISWC'03). I will make an effort to 
get this point more clearly across.

> 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.

Good point. I will try to include a proposed list of deliverables within 
the next few days.

> 
> 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.

Sounds very interesting, but unless there is some particular method that 
has been worked on and used, it is likely to be too much 
research-oriented and therefore outside the scope of this WG. BTW I see 
the work on the relationship to UML as visualization support.

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

Thanks for your comments,
Guus

> cheers
> 
> Chaals

-- 
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Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2003 13:31:54 UTC