WOWG: Charter issues (was RE: RE: parseType="daml:list" doesn't cut it)

It is the responsibility of the chairs to remind WG members of the 
charter when necessary.  I haven't confirmed the below w/Guus, and 
thus we may eventually want to mitigate the below, but I feel some of 
the discussion on the WG list is getting very close to the charter 
boundaries, so I want to make sure we are careful and don't go too 
far down paths that could take us out of scope.


At 3:45 PM -0600 3/5/02, Smith, Michael K wrote:
>I wanted to second Jim's comment re rdf:parsetype and N3.

I think you mean Jon's comments.

[snip]

At 3:45 PM -0600 3/5/02, Smith, Michael K wrote:
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------
>MOTION: The primary syntax for OWL will be defined in XML.


[snip]

Please be aware that the proposal here is something of a departure 
from charter terms, we are committed to:

At 9:02 PM -0500 3/5/02, Jim Hendler wrote:
>     * The language will use the XML syntax and datatypes wherever 
>possible, and will be designed for maximum compatibility with XML 
>and RDF language conventions.

so we are supposed to use XML, but also to have "Maximum 
compatibility" w/RDF, making it hard for us to forego it completely 
under this charter.  Further,

>The Working Group shall start by evaluating the technical solutions 
>proposed in the DAML+OIL draft. If in this process the Working Group 
>finds solutions that are agreed to be improvements over solutions 
>suggested by DAML+OIL, those improved solutions should be used.

this is the "elastic" clause in our charter - it lets us depart from 
how D+O did things, but only if we have substantial agreement that 
this is a significant technical improvement  -- the "significant" is 
my interpretation based on the Director's statement approving our WG. 
[Note that the Director's statement is W3C member only, so I will not 
state it here - WG members can see it at [1]
In that document, you will note a number of strong statements about 
how our work relates to that of RDF Core -- obviously we are expected 
to follow this guidance which represents the approval of our WG by 
the W3C membership]

So we are allowed to go this route, but understand a wholesale 
departure from RDF is out of charter, and a more mixed approach is 
allowed, but only if carefully justified with significant consensus 
from within the WG.


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-semweb-cg/2001Oct/0024.html
-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland		  College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Tuesday, 5 March 2002 21:19:05 UTC