W3C Workshop -- RDF Next Steps
Submitted by admin on May 25, 2010 - 12:31
Location:
Stanford University
Date(s):
Saturday, June 26, 2010 - Sunday, June 27, 2010
NCBO hosts the W3C workshop on Next Steps for RDF
The Resource Description Framework (RDF), including the general concepts, its semantics, and an XML Serialization (RDF/XML), have been published in 2004. Since then, RDF has become the core architectural block of the Semantic Web, with a significant deployment in terms of tools and applications.
As a result of the R&D activities and the publication of newer standards like SPARQL, OWL, POWDER, or SKOS, but also due to the large scale deployment and applications, a number of issues regarding RDF came to the fore. Some of those are related to features that are not present in the current version of RDF but which became necessary in practice (eg, the concept of “Named Graphs”). Others result from the difficulties caused by the design decisions taken in the course of defining the 2004 version of RDF (eg, restrictions whereby literals cannot appear as subjects). Definition of newer standards have also revealed difficulties when applying the semantics of RDF (eg, the exact semantics of blank nodes for RIF and OWL, or the missing connection between URI-s and the RDF resources named by those URI-s for POWDER). New serializations formats (eg, Turtle) have gained a significant support by the community, while the complications in RDF/XML syntax have created some difficulties in practice as well as in the acceptance of RDF by a larger Web community. Finally, at present there is no standard programming API to manage RDF data; the need may arise to define such a standard either in a general, programming language independent way or for some of the important languages (Javascript/ECMAscript, Java, Python,…)
It is therefore time to consider whether a revision of the 2004 version of RDF is necessary or whether the community can continue developing with the current version.
Workshop Goals
The goal of the workshop is to gather feedback from the Web community on whether and, if yes, in which direction RDF should evolve. One of the main issues the Workshop should help deciding is whether it is timely for W3C to start a new RDF Working Group to define and standardize a next version of RDF.
While a new version of RDF may include changes in terms of features, semantics, and serialization syntax(es), backward compatibility is of a paramount importance. Indeed, RDF has been deployed by tools and applications, and the last few years have seen a significant uptake of Semantic Web technologies and publication of billions of triples stemming from public databases (see, eg, the Linked Open Data community). It would be, therefore, detrimental to this evolution if RDF was seen as unstable and if the validity of current application would be jeopardized by a future evolution. As a consequence, with any changes of RDF, backward compatibility requirements should be formalized, along the lines of, say:
- any valid RDF graphs (in terms of the RDF 2004 version) should stay valid in terms of a new version of RDF; and
- any RDFS entailment drawn on RDF graphs using the 2004 semantics should be valid entailement in terms of a new version of RDF
The main outcome of the workshop will be the publication of a workshop proceedings and, in case there is a consensus on moving forward, a draft for a charter for a newly created RDF Working Group.
EventType:
Workshop
Website: