New Draft of TAG Finding "The Self-Describing Web"

I am pleased to announce the availability of a new draft of the TAG 
Finding "The Self-Describing Web" [1,2].  This is an editors draft that 
has not been approved by the TAG;  I expect that it will be discussed at 
the upcoming TAG F2F meeting in Vancouver.

Very extensive changes have been made since the previous draft [3] was 
published, and many of these changes were motivated by discussions [4] 
held at the June 2007 (Google) Face to Face Meeting of the TAG [5].  In 
addition to removing some of the introductory material that other members 
recommended I drop, significant changes in this rewrite include:

* A major new section introduces and highlights the standard HTTP-based 
retrieval "algorithm" that user agents employ to access self-describing 
resource representations.  (Focus on this algorithm was a key priority for 
Tim in our reviews).

* There is now extensive discussion of URI-based extensibility, and of the 
ability of user agents to dynamically acquire rules for interpreting new 
sorts of content by retrieving OWL ontologies, namespace documents (RDDL), 
etc.  Such dynamic discovery using URIs is now to some degree a unifying 
theme for the latter half of the finding.  Examples are also given of 
using URIs as the basis for extensible attribute values (e.g. link 
relationships) and other similar data fields in Web representations.

* The discussion of RDF and RDFa has been updated and clarified and the 
section on GRDDL has been added. 

* Numerous examples have been added.

FWIW:  I don't think this draft is quite final, but we've been through a 
number of significant rewrites, and I'm hoping that we're starting to 
converge on something not too far from this.  So, please review it with 
that in mind, but of course, feel free to say so if you feel otherwise. 
Comments on this draft should be posted to the www-tag@w3.org mailing 
list, and they are all much appreciated.  Thank you.

Noah

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/selfDescribingDocuments
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/selfDescribingDocuments-2008-02-08.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/selfDescribingDocuments-2007-05-24.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/06/01-minutes#item02
[5] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/05/29-agenda

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Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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Received on Friday, 8 February 2008 22:39:43 UTC