Thanks again for raising this, Andrei.
I know you've been doing a lot of work on this at MIT and from what you
and others have said it's clear that there's a lot of work in the public
domain. Good. The road from there to an actual standard is though still
quite steep I'm afraid.
The W3C members are currently reviewing a proposal that will merge and
expand upon the Semantic Web and eGovernment activities and that
includes a couple of new working groups [1,2] (if approved, it makes me
Data Activity Lead too so that's why I'm responding to you). We're also
expecting a new WG to be formed following the recent RDF Validation
workshop [3]. Our resources are, of course, finite and so committing
resources - I mean Team time - to a new WG can't happen without a lot of
evidence that the work is needed, likely to be implemented, and makes a
real impact on the Web. And even then we actually have to have a team
member available. The vehicle to gather that evidence is a Community
Group and I strongly encourage you to start one of those.
Use the CG to gather evidence of demand, existing and likely
implementations, and to build the community as widely as possible. You
can write a document that looks a lot like a standard too. See the ODRL
CG's output for instance! [4]. If you can do all that - and it's hard -
then we *might* be able to consider a new WG sometime next year.
Don't be put off - the CG route is made for situations like this and I
hope it will be successful in developing ideas for WebACL - we need it.
True, it doesn't get you access to the Zakim bridge, no. But you get
just about everything else [5] and Google Hangouts, Skype, WebEx,
GoToMeeting and so on provide reasonable alternatives.
Cheers
Phil.
[1] http://www.w3.org/2013/05/odbp-charter.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2013/05/lcsv-charter.html
[3] https://www.w3.org/2012/12/rdf-val/report
[4] http://www.w3.org/community/odrl/
[5] http://www.w3.org/community/about/tool/
On 17/10/2013 14:05, Andrei Sambra wrote:
Dear all,
For those of you who know me, please skip this paragraph. For the others, I
would first like to introduce myself. My name is Andrei Sambra and for the
past three years I have been involved in different W3C groups, such as
WebID, LDP and RWW (co-chair). As an advocate of Semantic Web technologies,
especially those taking user privacy into consideration, I am currently
working on two projects, MyProfile [1] (WebID provider / social network)
and RWW.IO [2], the later including support for WebID, LDP and WAC [3].
RWW.IO is a Read/Write Web-based personal data store.
Over the past few years, we have noticed that Linked Data is no longer a
technology limited to the public space, finding its way into consumer
applications. As a consequence, it becomes increasingly important to be
able to protect access to private/sensitive resources. To this regard, the Web
Access Control (WAC) ontology [3] has been put together by Tim Berners-Lee,
offering the basic means to set up ACLs. Due to its nature (i.e. an
ontology) however, it does not provide the formalism necessary to implement
it in order to achieve interoperability, nor does it provide an organized
space where it can be discussed and improved.
The reason behind writing the email is that I would like to know how many
people are interested in participating to the standardization process of a
Web Access Control spec.
The Read Write Web community group has so far been the host of inquiries
regarding the WAC ontology. However, being a community group, it does not
have access to W3C's teleconference system, nor to the issue tracking
system. Depending on your interest in a WAC spec, and the preliminary
discussions we might have, we may very well have to create a dedicated
working group. For now however, I suggest we use the public RWW list (
[email protected]) in order to coordinate the efforts on this subject.
Please let me know how you stand on this subject and perhaps suggest a way
to count who is interested in participating (doodle, something else maybe?).
Best wishes,
Andrei
[1] https://my-profile.eu/
[2] https://rww.io/
[3] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl
--
Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment
http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1
