Several members of the SWAD-Europe team are at the W3C All Groups and Technical Plenary meeting near Cannes this week. Many W3C working groups are meeting face to face including the new Semantic Web Best Practices working group on thursday and friday. I have been attending the Semantic Web Interest Group meeting for the first two days; the Semantic Web interest Group is the renamed and reconceptualized RDF Interest Group, chaired by Dan Brickley, who is also the director of SWAD-Europe. I summarise here a few of the of the many interesting topics of discussion over these two days, which were a mixture of discussions, presentations and lightening talks. These are just some of the things that struck me - the meeting was public and detailed logs (day 1, day 2) of presentations are available, plus links to the presentations and documents discussed (day 1, day 2), and I'm sure others will have their own comments to make.
Guus Schreiber summarised the scope of the new Semantic Web Best Practices working group, which is meeting on thursday and friday this week. Before his talk there was a constant refrain of 'that sounds like a job for best practices!' but the charter is reasonably constrained, covering
Most of the work will be focussed on producing W3C Notes; small taskforces with short lifespans will be set up to tackle particular issues and produce the notes. Non-W3C members may be invited to help. A publically readable mailing list for the working group is available, and a homepage.
These aims are very close to the focus of SWAD-Europe, and it's very pleasing to me personally to see further work at W3C in this direction; the feeling of the meeting also seemed to be very positive. The first meeting is this week (agenda).
Eric Prud'hommeaux introduced the new working group on RDF query and data access, for which he will be the W3C staff contact: Dan Connolly is the chair (there will also be a co-chair). Here's the charter, and an excerpt from the scope:
The principal task of the RDF Data Access Working Group is to gather requirements and to define an HTTP and/or SOAP-based protocol for selecting instances of subgraphs from an RDF graph. The group's attention is drawn to the RDF Net API submission. This will involve a language for the query and the use of RDF in some serialization for the returned results.
A crucial first step for the group will be to obtain usecases, testcases and requirements. Particularly important here will be the relationship between this work and XQuery. Rules, update, RDF Schema and OWL semantics, and cursors and proofs are out of scope for the group.
There was some discussion of the way in which the members of the interest groups interact. Currently people use the rdfig mailing lists (rdf-interest, rdf-rules, rdf-logic, rdf-calendar) or the #rdfig IRC channel, and these tools provide different kinds of interactions in the community. Email provides more continuity and context via threading; IRC with logging and weblog provides immediacy of interaction and a way to share links. Scheduled IRC chats have been used to talk about calendaring, images and geo, but these can work badly for those with English as a second language, or when people are very distributed around the world (Yoshio, Charles), and while they are useful for making fast, small decisions, a higher-level, architectural view is more difficult in that environment (Dirk). Weblogs, rss (and planet rdf), and the wiki are also very useful; audio/video are other possibilities.
The HTML working group joined us for an hour and presented a possible syntax for RDF in xhtml, probably for xhtml2 (Mark Birkbeck). It looks like a very plausible approach. Jeremy Carroll presented work he and Patrick Stickler have been working on - an alternative syntax for RDF called TRIX, processible by XML tools, and including names for graphs. Dan Connolly presented GRDDL, a mechanism for encoding RDF statments in xhtml and XML for extraction by XSLT tools. GRDDL could be used with the html group's proposal to generate RDF.
Closest to my own heart (apart from perhaps calendaring) was the short discsussion on RDF and images. Kendall Clark and I both did lightening presentations on this topic, mine covering some of the discussions (weblog entry) we have had in creating and combining vocabularies for image description, and some demos of the various tools for annotating parts of images. Kendall demonstrated the Mindswap java tool for annotating images with arbitrary ontologies. Both of us talked about the need for UI tools that help with what some people have called 'referential integrity' - in this case, being able to search for a person's name, and use the tool to map that to an identifier for the person, without having to type in the identifier by hand, and (preferably) regardless of misspellings. Both mine and the Mindswap tools use access to remote RDF datasources to do this.
Other presentations included Danny Ayers' XOW (winner of 'best slide of the meeting'), semantic blogging 'knobot' by Reto Backman , Jos de Roo on SWIG implementation experience in Euler, a presentation on WSDL and Semantic Web Services from Bijan Parsia. Corese : an RDF engine based on Conceptual Graphs (Olivier Corby), report on the SWAD-E scalability workshop (Dave Beckett), Annotea: location independent references to resources (José Kahan), Nokia Semantic Web server (Patrick Stickler), Using RDF Datatypes (Graham Klyne), Modelling Context using Named Graphs (Chris Bizer and Jeremy Carroll), Tell me about that URI (Dirk-Willem van Gulik), and Dan Connolly and I talking about calendaring, Danny Weitzner on privacy (The Transparency Paradox').