POWDER Working Group Blog

This was a holiday in the US so the European contingent had a brief call to ease back into the work after the summer break. First off, of course, there were cheers for the Last Call announcement and publication of initial drafts of the Primer and test Suite. Two issues were discussed. Firstly, that the XML element <issuedby> in POWDER will be transformed into the wdrs:issued by property in POWDER-S. Whilst there remains some uncertainty about what this points to (foaf:Agent or dcterms:Agent or wdrs:Agent which would either be a union of or sub class of the other two), the XML schema and POWDER-S vocabulary are unaffected and so can be updated quickly. Secondly, following on from the last call comment and subsequent e-mail discussion last month, for the time being at least we are going to use 'describedby' as our relationship type and propose two MIME types for POWDER and POWDER-S. These will be text/powder+xml and application/powder-s+xml respectively which we believe to be in line with RFC 3023, section 2 of which includes "If an XML document -- that is, the unprocessed, source XML document -- is readable by casual users, text/xml is preferable to application/xml. [..] Application/xml is preferable when the XML MIME entity is unreadable by casual users." These are not formal resolutions of the group but indicate our current thinking. The issue of @rel registration is being discussed in various groups, not least the Semantic Web Coordination Group.