RDF Steps Carefully Forward April 14, 2011

18 months ago, when Ivan Herman and I began to plan a new RDF Working Group, I posted my RDF 2 Wishlist. Some people complained that the Semantic Web was not ready for anything different; it was still getting used to RDF 1. I clarified that “RDF 2” would be backward compatible and not break existing system, just like “HTML 5” isn’t breaking the existing Web. Still, some people prefered the term “RDF 1.1”.

The group just concluded its first face-to-face meeting, and I think it’s now clear we’re just doing maintenance. If we were to do version numbering, it might be called “RDF 1.0.1”. This might just be “RDF Second Edition”. Basically, the changes will be editorial clarifications and bug fixes.

The adventurer in me is disappointed. It’s a bit like opening your birthday present to find nice warm socks, instead of the jet pack you were hoping for.

Of course, this was mostly clear from the workshop poll and the charter, but still, I had my hopes.

The most dramatic change the group is likely to make: advise people to stop using xs:string in RDF. Pretty exciting. And, despite unanimous support from the 14 people who expressed an opinion in the meeting, there has now been some strong pushback from people not at the meeting. So I think that’s a pretty good measure of the size change we can make.

As far as new stuff…. we’ll probably come up with some terminology for talking about graphs, and maybe even a syntax which allows people to express information about graphs and subgraphs. But one could easily view that as just properly providing the functionality that RDF reification was supposed to provide. So, again, it’s just a (rather complicated) bug fix. And yes, making Turtle a REC, but it’s already a de facto standard, so (again) not a big deal.

The group also decided, with a bit of disappointment for some, not to actively push for a JSON serialization that appeals to non-RDF-folks. This was something I was interested in (cf JRON) but I agree there’s too much design work to do in a Working Group like this. The door was left open for the group to take it up again, if the right proposal appears.

So, it’s all good. I’m comfortable with all the decisions the group made in the past two days, and I’m really happy to be working with such a great bunch of people. I also had a nice time visiting Amsterdam and taking long walks along the canals. But, one of these days, I want my jet pack.