POWDER Working Group formed

The W3C content label incubator group has published its report, defining a data model for content labels through which identified parties can make assertions about the properties of a resource, or groups of resources. This report is one of the major inputs to a new group that has now started in the Semantic Web activity: the POWDER Working Group. Quoting from their charter:

The mission of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group is to develop a mechanism through which structured metadata (“Description Resources”) can be authenticated and applied to groups of Web resources. This mechanism will allow retrieval of the description resources without retrieval of the resources they describe. The POWDER Working Group is chartered to specify an RDF vocabulary for specifying authorship of and authentication of Description Resources, a specification for associating a Description Resource with a class of Web resources, predicates for declaring classes of resources based on string functions of the resource URIs, and a protocol for accessing Description Resources.

it is also important to note that:

This working group is not chartered to make extensions to RDF core, neither is it chartered to research the broader development of the Semantic Web. It may, therefore, produce Recommendations that apply RDF and/or OWL technologies using the technique of signing and referencing documents without addressing broader requirements for signing and representing RDF graphs.

See the charter and the home page of the group for further details...

The first face-to-face meeting of the POWDER Working Group is planned in Darmstadt, Germany, on the 26 and 27 April, 2007.