New POWDER First Public Working Drafts Published

The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group has published the first working draft of its primary document. It sets out the proposed structure of Description Resources and how they are to be processed and interpreted. Drafts of companion documents have also been published which are the namespace documents for the RDF/OWL vocabulary and the data types used. Although the Description Resources document is clearly not finished, the group was keen to get it published to solicit feedback as soon as possible. A couple of open questions are highlighted and there are some dependencies on other working groups, including those looking at HTML, HTTP and RDFa. It is noteworthy too that Description Resources require the existence of vocabularies that W3C does not control itself (namely Friend of a Friend and Dublin Core). This led to an internal (largely member only) discussion about the long term stability and status of the FOAF vocabulary. Some feedback on the RDFa usage and other issues has already been received (which included corrections to silly mistakes) and more is, of course, welcome. Sections will soon be added soon to cover interpretation using rule languages and direct linkage to EARL.