Re: PROPOSAL to close ISSUE-46: conversion of plain literals to IRIs

For the records: I do not think I would agree with the argumentation below, though I accept the overall conclusion. But the issue of URI-s vs. strings, and their treatment, is _not_ an OGP issue at all, and I did not put it forward as a response of one specific application. The argumentation below suggests that. OGP is only a good example of the type of problems the developers' community has with RDFa (and RDF in general, I must admit).

Ivan



On Oct 18, 2010, at 22:27 , Manu Sporny wrote:

> If there are no objections to this proposal by this Thursday, October
> 21st at 13:00 UTC, we will close ISSUE-46: conversion of plain literals
> to IRIs.
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/track/issues/46
> 
> The Working Group has discussed the issue during several calls and the
> consensus seems to be to not support the automatic conversion of plain
> literals to IRIs.
> 
> While it was argued that Facebook expresses URLs as plain literals with
> its Open Graph Protocol and that other companies may want to provide
> methods to add this data into the HEAD element of an HTML document using
> plain literals, there were ambiguity issues (such as how to detect an
> IRI) as well as added complexity to include this feature in the
> specification.
> 
> The Working Group discussed extending this behavior to plain literals in
> an attempt to generalize the mechanism and felt that it would be
> difficult for people to express URI-like strings in a way that was
> simple for HTML authors. These changes would also create backwards
> compatibility concerns that are not covered in the RDFa WG charter. We
> also discussed constraining the automatic conversion to the META
> element, but felt that it was far too much of a kludge to perform
> special processing for only the META element.
> 
> In the end, the group could not find consensus on how to achieve this
> automatic conversion in a generalized fashion that didn't create
> ambiguity. There was more support for not providing this feature than
> there was in support of the feature. Even if the RDFa WG could find
> consensus, the feature would be placed into the specification in order
> to meet the needs of a specific application of RDFa (OGP), and not the
> RDFa community as a whole. The existence of OGP proves that companies
> may use and deploy this mechanism without negatively impacting their
> systems as it can be argued that how one interprets triples is up to the
> application layer. An OGP consumer is capable of understanding which
> properties are URLs and which ones are plain literals - case in point,
> Facebook.
> 
> This proposal asserts that no change should be made for the reasons
> listed above and that the issue should be closed.
> 
> Please comment before Thursday, October 21st at 13:00 UTC if you object
> to this proposal. If there are no objections by that time, this issue
> will be closed. If there are objections, the RDFa Working Group will
> perform a straw-poll and decide whether or not to close the issue before
> entering Last Call.
> 
> -- manu
> 
> -- 
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
> President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Saving Journalism - The PaySwarm Developer API
> http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/09/12/payswarm-api/
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
PGP Key: http://www.ivan-herman.net/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf