RdfIG

From W3C Wiki

The RDF Interest Group started summer 1999, with DanBri as chair; it is now part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity.

There is a homepage for RDF at W3C, also for the RDF Interest Group, and for the Semantic Web Activity, which is home to related work on the RDF Core specs, the Web Ontology Language OWL, and Semantic Web Advanced Development efforts.

Charters and Background

W3C's Activity Statement and RDFIG Charter provide more details on the formal role of these groups. The Semantic Web Activity was preceeded by a Metadata Activity at W3C; the older Activity Statement may also be of interest.

Chairing notes

Can I go first person for this bit? Nah, I'll write 'we' --DanBri (RDF Interest Group chair)

One thing we try to foster in the Interest Group is civility. This is usually easy, as RDF/SW folk are are pretty good natured bunch. Occasionally we'll see a fuss about something that might seem silly, eg. swearing. On this front a good influence is Rick Jelliffe's comments on confrontational XML-DEV culture, alongside much to admire in the ways of the Wiki crowd.

A not-quite random Gandhi quote... "Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent."

Discussion Fora

Most RDF IG discussion is on the www-rdf-interest mailing list, though there are a number of more specialized MailingLists:

  • www-rdf-logic (logical foundations of RDF and SemWeb)
  • www-rdf-calendar (calendaring and scheduling apps)
  • www-rdf-rules (interop discussions for RDF rule and query engines)

Other lists exist which may be of interest:

  • www-rdf-dspace (for the Dspace project team)
  • www-rdf-tap (the TAP project)
  • public-esw (SWAD-Europe project)

A number of RDF IG regulars also use the IRC chat channel, #rdfig on irc.freenode.net. IRC is a realtime textual chat protocol. The RDF IG discussions are archived and summarised in weblog format at rdfig.xmlhack.com. XML dumps are available at /archive.tgz. If you do anything interesting with that dataset, do let www-rdf-interest know.


As usual, a PPR:WikiMaster puts discussion below the line.

I'd like to use this space to note ideas for future directions for the group. -- DanBri - 10 Feb 2003

meanwhile, here's a quick hack for locally searching the /archive.tgz download of #rdfig annotated URLs...:


danbri@fireball:~/tmp/chump$ grep -i 'owl' */*/*/*xml|wc