Meeting Summary 2014-12-22

Meeting minutes: http://www.w3.org/2014/22/15-dpub-minutes.html

Main discussions

Metadata Task Force report

Bill Kasdorf gave an overview of the report produced by the Task Force. The report addresses the outcome of the interviews (included in a separate document, linked from the main text).

The main question was whether the TF would uncover any serious issues in the OWP to fulfill the needs around metadata of the digital publishing community. As a high level conclusion the answer is that, although the publishers have many metadata issues, the ground of these issues are not part of the OWP. For example, the community uses a large number of different vocabularies, but W3C already provides a universal framework and syntaxes to express those. There are also a large number of groups under various umbrellas (e.g., as part of the BISG) that address some of the issues (e.g., relationships to schema.org) and, in the Task Force’s opinion, there is no need to form yet another group at W3C to address those and thereby work in parallel.

The Task Force also identified some general issues that the community faces where W3C could encourage and initiate outreach and informational documents. Two examples came to the fore:

• how identifiers are used, and whether these identifiers are expressed as URI-s
• what type of documentations, outreach documents, etc, are available for the usage of RDF and its serializations like RDFa

For both of these cases the document includes a table to list some of the characteristic cases. (As subsequent discussions made it clearer, the table on identifiers concentrate, at the moment, on identifiers produced by general, independent organizations, standard setting organizations, or grass-root initiatives; a future version may add individual initiatives of company product URI-s like Google or Amazon identifiers.)

A final area addressed by the document is the expression of rights metadata, and the necessary vocabularies thereof. There is a W3C Community Group on ODRL at the moment, but it is not clear whether that vocabulary is widely used and accepted by the community to initiate a standardization work. In any case, this is a general area that should be kept on the radar of the W3C and other organizations.

The group has resolved to publish this document as a note (in January, after some final editing is done). Also in January a discussion should happen to see what further work should happen in this area within the Interest Group.

Accessibility Task Force

Charles LaPierre gave an overview on the work plan as worked by Deborah Kaplan and himself, and published on the accessibility wiki. The goal is to provide a review of the UAAG, WCAG, and ATAG documents, focusing on the techniques, to establish whether (a) these documents cover all the issues faced by the publishing community, and (b) whether these documents are properly “used” by the publishing community as a whole (see also the goals of the TF as outlined in a separate email). The group also discussed whether the ARIA work should also be reviewed in a similar manner; the agreement was to concentrate on the *AG documents for the time being, and possibly come back to ARIA if time permits.

There was a general agreement on the fact that the task is a significant challenge in view of the available manpower and there were some discussion on what the best way is to organize the task force. The advice was to set up a regular, (bi-)weekly telcon, maybe on alternating timezones. It was also agreed to come back on the planning issue sometimes towards the end of January.