W3C

RDF-Star WG biweekly meeting

22 May 2025

Attendees

Present
AndyS, AZ, csarven, doerthe, eBremer, enrico, fsasaki, gkellogg, gtw, james, ktk, niklasl, olaf, ora, pfps, Souri, tl, william-vw
Regrets
pchampin
Chair
ora
Scribe
ktk

Meeting minutes

Approval of minutes from the last two meetings: 1 , 2

ora: we have one new member today, welcome csarven

csarven: I'm Sarven. I've been working on semantic web, linked data, RDF, etc. for a while now
… I tend to build stuff in order to understand what the tech is about.
… I eat my own dogfood, whether it's for content or applications.
… I was in the group as an AC rep some while ago. Now I'm an invited expert.
… I'm an elected member of TAG
… I joined this group to contribute what I can within the remaining time. I expect this to be mostly editorial changes.
… I won't be doing any deep philosophical reconsiderations.
… I try to bring in some fresh eyes for the work done so far.
… I will communicate the work here to the TAG.
… I expect some explainers that the group needs to pass to TAG.
… I'll try to help with that.
… I'm a big RDFa dork, I know the group is not taking it up now. But always happy to talk about it.

ora: welcome, and we certainly appreciate the closer liaison with the TAG.

ora: I'm personally happy to talk about RDFa at a later stage.

ora: any concerns or corrections for the minutes?

<ora> PROPOSAL: Approve last two meetings' minutes.

<ktk> +1

<gkellogg> +1

<niklasl> +1

<james> +1

<eBremer> +1

<AndyS> +1

<tl> +1

<gtw> +1

<ora> +1

<olaf> #1

<gb> CLOSED Issue 1 No activity (nor even README) since WG approval in August (by TallTed)

<olaf> +1

<fsasaki> +1

<AZ> +1

<william-vw> +1

<Souri> +1

<pfps> +1

RESOLUTION: Approve last two meetings' minutes.

Proposal for next week's discussion 3

Last meeting: https://www.w3.org/2025/05/15-rdf-star-minutes.html

gkellogg: what's not on here, in RDF/XML we have upcoming support for triple terms and annotations. But probably not anything special for reifying triples.
… I don't know if this is something we want to think about, to have a high-level syntactic representation of it like we do in Turtle and Trig.

tl: I will be traveling next week, I can't participate if the group wants to discuss w3c/rdf-star-wg#130

<gb> Issue 130 vocabulary to refer to the individual nodes in a reified triple term (by rat10) [needs discussion]

AndyS: We could discuss w3c/rdf-n-triples#58

<gb> Pull Request 58 Version announcement. (by gkellogg) [needs discussion] [spec:enhancement]

gkellogg: We have not decided what the system should do if the version does not match the content.

AndyS: let's do a separate issue for that so we don't have to do it in the PR

AndyS: Is w3c/rdf-schema#45 blocking anything?

<gb> Issue 45 Acknowledge the two purposes of this document (by pchampin) [needs discussion] [spec:editorial]

AndyS: I don't know exactly what it is about.

pfps: It does not look like it's blocking anything. It's just if we want to change the names.

ora: pchampin wants to rename some, we can have this discussion.

AndyS: it's been "Schema" for so long...

pfps: the point exactly

pfps: what about https://github.com/w3c/rdf-turtle/issues/89, did we discuss that?

<gb> Issue 89 Different parsing of the same absolute IRI with or without base IRI (by Tpt) [ErratumRaised] [needs discussion]

ora: I need to understand it more

pfps: order looks fine now

Review of open actions, available at 4

ora: enrico what is the status on w3c/rdf-star-wg#148

<gb> Action 148 delete reification subsection from appendix D of semantics spec (on franconi) due 2025-03-07

pfps: my recollection is it was only added because Pat wanted to say "there is no semantics"

doerthe: after pfps pointed that out, I agreed with him. Before I was not sure if we have this information somewhere. Now I know it's in RDF Schema.

pfps: we might want to put a note in Semantics, I'll add a note in the issue

enrico: in any case we should not have the part that explains old reification. That would be weird.

pfps: I don't think that's the right way to go. Container vocab is even more obsolete than reification.

enrico: Yes but for reification we have an alternative now. For containers we don't.

ora: there are applications that use containers.

pfps: so are for reification.

ora: yes

doerthe: do you want to remove the vocabulary as well then enrico? If it's not removed, we should explain it somewhere.

enrico: I agree and it should go into the notes that explain the connection between the new and the old reification.

doerthe: and you would not put it into RDF Schema then?

AndyS: I would be happy in having everything in RDF Schema

<niklasl> +1 to small paragraph note in semantics which reference that note and/or rdf-schema (terms are still in `rdf:`). And very much yes, the terms are used. Likely won't go away.

AndyS: I don't think we can remove reification from there. We could say there is RDF 1.2 work about it and link to it.
… It's very difficult to get rid of vocabularies.

ora: my take is we can never get rid of vocabs, they are closed. Who knows what is out there.

enrico: At least we have to edit the section & say please use the new style.

ora: who is currently editing RDF Schema document?

doerthe: it's Dominik Tomaszuk

ora: so we put a small note into the semantics document & say that this has moved.

doerthe: I will tell Dominik that the note will move to the Schema document.

niklasl: I'm waiting for something that we discuss next week

Review of pull requests, available at 5

pfps: fix up definitions for non-ground graphs +128 I accepted all, should be good

<gb> Issue 128 map the annotation syntax to `rdfs:states` (by rat10) [enhancement]

pfps: on w3c/rdf-semantics#126 I'm against most changes

<gb> Pull Request 126 Some improved language, punctuation, and markup in rdf-semantics (by TallTed) [spec:editorial]

gkellogg: w3c/rdf-turtle#88 is waiting for some changes in ReSpec for dark mode. any update niklasl?

<gb> Pull Request 88 Setup dark mode based on work in rdf-primer and elsewhere. (by gkellogg) [spec:editorial]

niklasl: no activity so far, I'll check what I can do

ora: if you as editor against it, it should not happen.

pfps: the working group did not decide what should happen.
… do we want to discuss if we use em-dashes in the group?

ora: that's a no from me
… editor's discretion

ora: are the other dark mode issues all about the same?

pfps: yes

AndyS: we said we check it on one document and then apply on the other documents if good.
… I hope we get a stable base in the tooling before I adjust everything in SPARQL. There is custom code there.

ora: N-Triples version announcement is waiting for next week's discussion?

niklasl: yes

ora: what about w3c/sparql-query#221

<gb> Pull Request 221 Consider bnode graph names in evaluation of Graph (by hartig)

gkellogg: still in discussion

olaf: it's in progress, I respond to AndyS comment

AndyS: no dispute, just ongoing discussions.
… we just have a few things to sort out.

ora: excellent.

ora: what about the ones in RDF Concepts?

csarven: you have strong opinions on https://github.com/w3c/rdf-concepts/pull/182?

<gb> Pull Request 182 Declare advisement level keywords for non-normative content in Conformance (by csarven) [spec:editorial] [spec:wontfix]

csarven: I know you discussed it. I'm aware that this is an editorial change. It's fine that the group doesn't touch anything related to RDF Concepts document or any other document.

<csarven> e.g. https://github.com/speced/bikeshed/blob/a6f7e1a35973ce6502de459f3c33339086db0f90/bikeshed/lint/accidental2119.py#L11

csarven: What I highlight is that some groups & tooling like Bikeshed is going into a direction recommending that you use a requirement level term in a non-normative section. It's part of the default check to raise awareness on the editors.
… Even in TAG we have documents that are moving away from any of these keywords in non-normative sections. It's more becoming a practice.
… The strong position I had was that the justification was not very good why it can't be done.
… The discussion could very well be we don't have time. But from a technical level there is no reason not to do it. Especially because of the new, good practice.
… The proposal was just for this specific document. Not for all documents.
… I'm happy to stand back and let the group do what they see fit. I cannot say whether TAG will say something about it, but I raise it as one thing that could be mentioned.
… If you want to improve the language in the spec, that's a direction to go.
… It's a language thing and it helps understanding if a section is normative or not.

AndyS: I am fully supportive of the idea when it's applied for new documents.
… But my concerns are: If you put it into one document, one should update all documents in the same fashion.
… Second, we don't know the intention of the original document.

ora: was there something blocking from Olaf?

csarven: I think I took care of that.

<csarven> https://github.com/w3c/rdf-concepts/pull/182/commits/b72df99bd358daab1e9beaf2bcbf2ad8b1a807fa

<gb> Pull Request 182 Declare advisement level keywords for non-normative content in Conformance (by csarven) [spec:editorial] [spec:wontfix]

olaf: I had a look at it again after the discussions
… I agree with AndyS concerns, I don't think it's a good idea

gkellogg: if we were supposed to do it, I would expect some support for it in ReSpec.
… I have not seen any errors from ReSpec so far.
… I'm not against having standardized terminology for non-normative things. But if that is the direction the W3C goes, I expect to see discussions for the process.

<Zakim> csarven, you wanted to discuss ReSpec and recommending advisement language in tooling and or process

csarven: I'm not an expert in ReSpec & Bikeshed. I was recently using Bikeshed and it alerted us.
… I don't see a check in ReSpec, I think it does not implement that kind of warning.
… I can move on from this PR and I can report back.

ora: I would appreciate that.
… also AndyS viewpoint on this

csarven: If ReSpec would do this, would this be sufficient to follow up on it? I don't think the process says it.

ora: my feeling is at this point we should be doing what really needs to be done.

AndyS: I'm surprised it's retrofitted to a group that is running for a while.

Summary of resolutions

  1. Approve last two meetings' minutes.
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 244 (Thu Feb 27 01:23:09 2025 UTC).

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All speakers: AndyS, csarven, doerthe, enrico, gkellogg, niklasl, olaf, ora, pfps, tl

Active on IRC: AndyS, AZ, csarven, doerthe, eBremer, fsasaki, gkellogg, gtw, james, ktk, niklasl, olaf, ora, pchampin, pfps, Souri, tl, william-vw