I recently attended the 2012 W3C Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee (TPAC) in Lyon, France from October 29 to November 2.
RDF WG: Monday and Tuesday
I attended the RDF F2F Working Group face to face meeting as an observer since I'm not an member of that WG though of course interested in a number of topics. The RDF working group is nearing the end of its charter (Jan 2013) and making good progress on a number of its deliverables such as Turtle, JSON, TriG, n-triple, n-quad serialization formats. There are a number of key issues that are of great interest such as ISSUE-77 marking rdf:Seq as archaic (this if particular interest to work at OSLC). There was a breakthrough in direction with named graphs by resolving to not define detailed semantics on identification of graphs, instead just allowing simply names/labels for graphs.
TPAC Plenary Day: Wednesday
Jeff Jaffe CEO of W3C kicked off the day with a brief keynote and then logistics for breakout sessions.
I attended these sessions:
- Social Web: lots of interest in linked data and social web.
- Government Linked Data: discussion and update on work going on with existing WG, there is need for some guidelines and have need for LDP work
- Linked Data for Web Developers: a fair amount of discussion around JSON, including a "white-boarding" session by Tim Berners-Lee talking about some approaches using JSON. There was also discussion of a need for some schema-like need for RDF data, which I explained we have similar need and have some experience with OSLC Resource Shapes.
Linked Data Platform (LDP): Thursday and Friday
Of course this was the primary reason I was here. Agenda covered a range of topics as it was our first face to face meeting. Discussed Use Case and Requirements, Primer, Test Suite, Implementations, next F2F and of course spec issues. Tim Berners-Lee attended both days and was very active in discussing the issues, he had strong views on how some of LDP should be shaped.
Probably the biggest change is the resolution around ISSUE-25 where the ldp:Container follows strong composition model instead of weaker aggregation. There was discussion for a common set of needs around paging and ordering of contents.
Overall Impressions
It is clear there are many W3C members that are very passionate and believers of Linked Data, including Tim Berners-Lee. Discussions with many shown they are interested in keeping LDP simple and willing to jump in and add support to their products early.
