I recently attended the 2012 W3C Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee (TPAC) in Lyon, France from October 29 to November 2.
On Monday and Tuesday I sat in on the RDF F2F Working Group face to face meeting as an observer interested in this as RDF is a core to OSLC as it IS our resource (data) model. Of particular interest are format specifications such as Turtle, JSON, TriG, n-triple and n-quad. Also some key issues of interest around usage of rdf:List and rdf:Seq, where rdf:List is now preferred usage.
RDF WG Minutes: Day 1 and Day 2
On Wednesday was the TPAC Plenary Day, which featured an unconference day and I attended breakout sessions related to OSLC and Linked Data:
- 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.
The main reason for my visit was for the first face to face meeting of the Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group on Thursday and Friday. With being a new working group and being the first time we have all met in person, there is always a bit of "getting to know each other" that needs to occur. 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 was clear from various industry experts, that what we are doing with OSLC is right on the mark. Which is good to hear as these individuals have a wealth of experience in current Linked Data range of technologies. By aligning OSLC's core technology with this standardization of Linked Data Platform, it ensures that we have a very solid foundation to build a scalable, flexible and loosely-coupled integrated tools that can operate with data from many different domains.