Hi Renato, Tim,
I completely agree with Renato and wanted to emphasize that my original
email was not meant in any way to diminish the importance of the earlier
work he did on vCard in RDF or to say that the new note is perfect. In
fact, the last Social Web camp gave Harry, Dan, and myself a chance to
discuss some of the improvements that could made to the document,
including examples and an explanation of the two ways of using vCard in
RDF (where properties are attached to a vcard:VCard vs. properties
attached to a foaf:Person).
As you say the issue is more general. I wouldn't mind seeing the W3C to
become the organization where ontologies are developed in a
collaborative fashion and hosted in a long term, but as you say that
requires a process, and in general a certain level of commitment.
Practically, I would be happy with cleaning up the existing notes and
putting in place some barriers for entry so that people can not easily
submit any half-baked ontology as a member submission or note of some sort.
Thanks,
Peter
Renato Iannella wrote:
On 11 May 2009, at 13:19, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
This process has not been done in a an RDF Calendaring group, as
there has not been apparent energy from the community (so far) for a
WG to be formed.
It was just done under an Interest Group.
Hence a bunch of community drafts, no working group, no process, no
chair following it, no team contact, etc.
An W3C Interest Group has a clear process:
<http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/groups.html#GAGeneral>
As a W3C member, I would have expected the "new" vCard ontology to be
a W3C IG Note (at least) - that would have raised its profile and,
hopefully, flagged its relationship/conflict with other W3C submissions.
No recommendations from W3C.
This URI <http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns>, apparently, is now enough
of a recommendation.
You get (in quality, stability, consensus) what you pay for (in
people's time).
We could change this -- an incubator group could start instantly,
draw up a charter for a WG, and do the thing properly.
Perhaps the SWIG could still do this...
Tim
On 2009-05 -10, at 20:52, Renato Iannella wrote:
On 7 May 2009, at 16:45, Peter Mika wrote:
For the world at large, the later note (by Harry and Norm) seems to be
an update on the earlier note, since it fixes many of the issues
(naming
conventions, use of certain RDF constructs etc.) That is once
people see
both... the problem is that people stumble upon one or the other quite
randomly and of course once they find a vcard in RDF note from the W3C
they will not hunt to see if there is an other one ;)
...this seems to be a problem with the "semantic web"...if you find
a RDF schema you don't like, then reinvent the entire ontology
elsewhere (even at the same organisation)!
The "new" ontology does not even recognise/refer to the "old" ontology.
Looking back at the archives:
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2006Nov/0079.html>
it seems that any private discussion can lead to a W3C
namespace...then after the fact does the process "Let the discussion
begin"...
W3C needs to manage this process much much better...
Cheers... Renato Iannella
NICTA
Cheers... Renato Iannella
NICTA
