Sunday, December 11, 2011

W3C Workshop on Linked Enterprise Data Patterns

I attended a W3C Workshop title "Linked Enterprise Data Patterns" on December 6&7, 2011 at MIT in Cambridge, MA. It had many interesting sessions covering a wide variety of topics. The position paper by Rational presenting by Martin Nally covered what we learned in Rational and with OSLC. Responses made it clear that we weren't alone with seeing this need. This included Tim Berners-Lee and many other attendees with years of experience deploying and building Linked Data applications.

Key result of the workshop was consensus on the need for standardization, as logged in IRC:
(1:45:06 PM) sandro: RESOLVED: We want a Working Group to produce a W3C Recommendation which defines a Linked Data Platform -- something that solves IBM Rational's use case (presented yesterday). We expect this to be an enumeration of specs which constitute linked data, with some small additional specs to cover things like pagination, if necessary.

Next steps will involve evolving the IBM Developer Works publication "Towards a Basic Profile for Linked Data" into a member submission for consideration into the W3C Recommendation track.