W3C

CSV on the Web Working Group Teleconference

11 Jun 2014

Agenda

See also: IRC log

Attendees

Present (names plus IRC handle)
Dan Brickley (danbri), Stasinos Konstantopoulos (stasinos), Jeremy Tandy (jtandy), Andy Seaborne (AndyS), Eric Stephan (ericstephan), Alfonso Noriega (fonso), Alf Eaton (fresco), Yakov Shafranovich (yakov), David Ceolin (DavideCeolin)
Regrets
Jeni, Ivan
Chair
Dan Brickley
Scribe
Dan Brickley

Contents


<trackbot> Date: 11 June 2014

4 june record http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-csv-wg/2014Jun/0029.html

resolved: fair record

AndyS: no progress

"with all requirements work, … maybe best to wait until that completes"

"some of the requirements are getting into design"

jeremy: "fair comment, have tried to remove/fix those"

'How to distinguish field (cell) references in JSON, and other questions about templates'

<- jeremy q

jeremy: having made some progress on UC + requirements, I took a look at the templates

… got to thinking how cell refs work in json, where curly braces are heavily used

AndyS: I don't think it would be a problem…

… Gregg was proposing some of this stuff, and he loves JSON, …

… we could pick diff delimiters for diff syntaxes

… curly brackets are fairly natural in RDF

… others elsewhere

jtandy: the whole brace enclosure could be a non-issue, look to see if the thing in the brace is a valid col ref, or cell ref

… probably in hindsight where Gregg's coming from

jtandy: am trying to apply this + metadata to the weather

danbri: i liked my turtle template experiment having files that count as real turtle

andys: maybe, but someone put it the other way around ,… being able to work lightweight and not need to parse as RDF

… you could use it as a big string

andys: tricky bits — suppose you're generating a predicate as a prefix'd name

<AndyS> namespace:{col}

<AndyS> subject namespace:{col} object .

andys: trying to come up with examples where the curly brackets aren't hidden in something that won't be touched

Progressing XML & JSON conversions

jtandy: json conversion falls out of the …

… of the conversion approach we're trying for json-ld

… seems to work for me. Not looking at XML myself.

Use cases

jtandy: Eric, … where are we with UC review + feedback?

ericstephan: we have feedback from most of the reviewers
... overnight, a few more questions have come out. At this point we've given at least 2 calls asking for checks. I'd like to propose that if we can catch up today/tomorrow, then we've given opportunity for feedback. If we don't have feedback, then we've given fair notice, ...

dan: cut off end of this week?

jtandy: David Booth has got back to me, is hoping to pick up his review next week

dan: what further work needed?

jtandy: listed to discuss later

UCR open issues

jtandy: rather than review open issues, just note that they are open in github

https://github.com/w3c/csvw/issues?labels=Use+Case+Document&page=1&state=open

PTAL

please take a look

:)

UCR blank cells

jtandy: I opened discussion recently about whether row by row processing is sufficient

… some examples have used a blank field to indicate a ditto

'same as cell above', or 'same as cell to left'

stasinos suggests that the missing value definitions could be enhanced to say 'take my value from somewhere else'

jtandy: if you can refer to another col in a row

that's easy

<stasinos> +q

if you're referring up or down in doc, it breaks our row-by-row processing model

<fresco> ideally, exporting merged cells would put the same value in each cell

andys: there has to be … somewhere, … deal with cycles, as spreadsheets deal with

<fresco> i.e. all references should be converted to their actual values on export

… if youre doing spreadsheety things, … why not make a spreadsheet. On the other hands, some kinds of references may be useful. I've not had time to dive into use cases.

…. do we have fwd ref to a row you've not encountered yet?

jtandy: personally I've only seen refs to earlier in the file

… rather than fwd refs to things I've not parsed yet

stasinos, this and summing regions, spreadsheet-esque things, ...

… you can do this specific thing by just remembering one row

… we need to remember a couple of rows, because of the header

stasinos: main point, … doesn't increase expressivity as we need headers anyway

danbri: consider hadoop-like parallel processing.

… also that preprocessing for grid-extracts, and regex exploded cols, v appealing.

jtandy: in this UC job classification, it's more than just remember the previous row

danbri: is there a simple pre-processing step that would make data more normalised

?

jtandy: sometimes blanks are blanks, sometimes it means the last value above/left.
... sometimes it's even within the same col

… not a core use case for me

danbri: they should fix it themselves!

stasinos: mech for data provider telling us what to do when encountering a particular value

… for a particular column, dataset, … data provider would have to tell us what it means

…same applies for explaining what a blank means, and where

… consider case where same col has real blanks and dittos pathological, needs provider-fix

… the standard export format for major spreadsheet software of this is more legitimate

status of UC

"consensus agreement on whether the UCR document is ready for republication as PWD"

jtandy: keen to get sense of if WG things it is ready to go

… who has read it through?

danbri: only the new jobs case

eric/davide?

eric: I've scanned it overall, it is shaping up nicely, one part that I didn't get to follow up on (maybe davide can comment), was categorization

… I noticed some categories were empty at this point

should those categories be eliminated? or more work needed there?

davide: can be deleted

eric: I'll go back and make sure the contributors line up with the doc

<scribe> ACTION: davide remove empty categories from UC doc [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2014/06/11-csvw-minutes.html#action01]

<trackbot> Created ACTION-23 - Remove empty categories from uc doc [on Davide Ceolin - due 2014-06-18].

davide: some CSV codes are quite large, in doc, goes beyond the yellow box (doc formatting)

… should we leave as is, … adjust?

jtandy: this is for example bits of csv in the doc, which are sometimes long

… we can't just add line-breaks

… I'm comfortable with those people who are really interested scrolling to the right

danbri: are the actual samples linkable too?

jtandy: in many cases yes, and linked already.

ericstephan: for future ref, this is where it could make sense from a printing perspective, to make a link off to the larger CSV, and put an image into the doc

… I know we want actual copies of the csv, but maybe image in doc makes it more tractable

davide: re categories, i can't now see any empty categories
... or class of requirements

only 'accepted requirements'

regarding specifics, i don't see any that are now empty.

I remember deleting some time back

ericstephan: apologies, perhaps this was comment on a prev version

jtandy: in version I see, section 3.2.2 is empty, 3.2.3, 3.2.4

<jtandy> http://w3c.github.io/csvw/use-cases-and-requirements/index.html#can-req-annotation

3.2.2 Requirements relating to annotation of CSV

3.2.3 Requirements relating to metadata discovery

3.2.4 Requirements relating to applications

davide: ok, will fix!

danbri: more for today?

jtandy: for consensus agreement, let's make sure we get signoff next week

RESOLUTION: prepare for publication signoff on the UC+R doc in next week's call

i.e. everyone read/comment

danbri: possible cultural heritage use case looming

jtandy: I raised issue on list, … that metadata vocab missing some flags, referenced in the 'parsing tabular data' data model

jtandy flags the flags

<yakovsh> +q

<jtandy> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-csv-wg/2014Jun/0070.html

yakovsh: regarding flags and encoding, … it is carried in the mimetype. If it can be carried in the (metadata) doc itself, we need to deal with conflicts

danbri: needed for cdroms, data sticks, ...

yakovsh: agree needed, we just need to say what to do in case of a conflict

see html, xml, … find least painful way of doing it.

Summary of Action Items

[NEW] ACTION: davide remove empty categories from UC doc [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2014/06/11-csvw-minutes.html#action01]
 
[End of minutes]

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$Date: 2014/06/11 16:24:25 $