W3C

– DRAFT –
RDF & SPARQL WG meeting

29 January 2026

Attendees

Present
AndyS, doerthe, Dominik_T, enrico, gtw, ktk, lisp, niklasl, olaf, ora, pfps, Souri, TallTed, tl2
Regrets
fsasaki, pchampin
Chair
ora
Scribe
AZ

Meeting minutes

Approval of last week’s minutes: 1

<pfps> minutes look acceptable

AndyS: the link to "next week's meeting" is broken because we did not have a meeting last week

ktk: we will fix this

<ora> PROPOSAL: Approve minutes from 2 weeks ago

<ora> +1

<niklasl> +1

<enrico> +1

<ktk> +1

<TallTed> +1

<Souri> +1

<gtw> +1

<AZ> +0 (I was not present)

<AndyS> +1

<olaf> +1

<lisp> +1

<Dominik_T> +1

<tl2> +1

<pfps> +1

RESOLUTION: Approve minutes from 2 weeks ago

Updates from the SPARQL TF

AndyS: we have PRs in progress
… we had a discussion on service description

ora: is it related to the separate SPARQL spec?

AndyS: yes

ora: is it the spec that nobody implements?

ktk: I've seen it on most endpoint, not necessarily of the best quality

pfps: implementations depend on it
… and some implement extensions of it

ktk: it may be a good time to talk about the security meeting

ora: security people wanted to point out threats
… we may want to talk about them but not necessarily propose solutions

ktk: for SPARQL they were thinking of injections and things from SQL
… we said that this is very hard to fix because of open world and other things
… we have to go back to the drawing board and see

TallTed: can we inherit by reference the security review for HTTP
… not sure the security group have figured this out yet
… it wouldn't be fair that we deal with all these problems

ora: we wil talk again to the security group and mention this

pfps: the IETF spec has 4 pages of security considerations

ktk: please post a link to this

<pfps> HTTP spec (maybe not the most recent) is https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7231

AndyS: I agree we can only highlight problems but not suggest solutions

<pfps> See https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7231#section-9 for the security issues

AndyS: any solutions is more likely to rot than the attacks
… we are less worried of ingestion that SQL

TallTed: it would be good to have the date of the meeting added to the calendar

ktk: we don't have the date yet but yes

Horizontal Reviews Tracking 2 3 4

ktk: it was interesting to talk to people who have no knowledge of RDF
… there is a misunderstanding that some things we define are abstract concepts and that cannot cause attacks or security issues

ktk: we have to work on the security part, the rest is going rather smoothly

pfps: there was an issue relative to privacy on semantics
… or maybe that was accessibility rather than pricacy
… the complaint was about using tables

<pfps> Table issue is in w3c/a11y-request#139

<gb> CLOSED Issue 139 rdf12-semantics 2025-11-25 > 2025-12-23 (by ktk) [LC] [REVIEW REQUESTED] [pending] [s:rdf12-semantics]

pfps: afaics, tables don't have a semantic meaning in HTML

niklasl: I could have a go at that

pfps: if this is strictly editorial, we can address it later

niklasl: there may be HTML5 elements that are better suited

<AndyS> w3c/rdf-semantics#174

<gb> Issue 174 check text inside tables (by pfps) [spec:editorial]

Review of open actions, available at 5

Identifying issues to solve before CR 6

AndyS: I raised 3 issues on RDF semantics re. tests
… we need to have a clean set of tests to go to CR

AndyS: if there is a missing file in the MANIFEST the test crashes

<enrico> w3c/rdf-semantics#178

<gb> Pull Request 178 Update RDF dataset merge definition (by franconi) [ms:CR]

<enrico> https://rawcdn.githack.com/w3c/rdf-semantics/1a96b5becc00eedf4c1b494349f91f0230e9a5de/spec/index.html#rdf_datasets

enrico: there is a PR that is ready to be closed re. the definition of Dataset merge
… It took all the comments that came in

ora: do we need more reviews?

enrico: there was already a lot of discussions on it

ora: so it's ready to be merged

enrico: will do right now

<TallTed> changes to 2 lines of w3c/rdf-semantics#178 ... That's what we get for rushing the merge.

ktk: regardiong issue 248, we have regular people in the group that should be acknowledged

<TallTed> (note that the indents of those lines should also be normalized)

ktk: and some people are technically in the group but never join
… should we acknowledge everyone?

ora: we should scrutinise this a bit

AndyS: Pierre-Antoine can help us on this

Any Other Business (AOB), time permitting

<ktk> https://github.com/orgs/w3c/projects/20/views/11

<enrico> TallTed -- I will try to add your fix to the merged PR #178

<gb> Issue 178 Create bibliography for students/engineers/scientists (by sulivanShu) [documentation]

<AndyS> w3c/rdf-schema#64

<gb> MERGED Pull Request 64 Add canonical Turtle for RDF-recognized XSD datatypes (`ns/rdf-xsd.ttl`) (by domel)

<AndyS> https://github.com/w3c/rdf-schema/blob/main/ns/rdf-xsd.ttl

AndyS: there is this file [see above] related to this PR
… we can close it

<ktk> w3c/rdf-schema#67

<gb> Issue 67 Add xsd:numeric to rdf-xsd.ttl (by ektrah) [propose closing]

AndyS: issue 67 needs to be closed (PR 64 is already merged)

TallTed: we have to check with ektrah

ktk: I closed it

ora: we can adjourn

Summary of resolutions

  1. Approve minutes from 2 weeks ago
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 248 (Mon Oct 27 20:04:16 2025 UTC).

Diagnostics

Succeeded: s/wame/came

Succeeded: s/more reviews/more reviews?/

Succeeded: s|2 lines of that PR|2 lines of https://github.com/w3c/rdf-semantics/pull/178|

Succeeded: s/TallTed: I/TallTed -- I

All speakers: AndyS, enrico, ktk, niklasl, ora, pfps, TallTed

Active on IRC: AndyS, AZ, doerthe, Dominik_T, enrico, fsasaki, gtw, ktk, lisp, niklasl, olaf, ora, pfps, Souri, TallTed, tl2