[oslc-core] [rant] Re: OSLC Core spec query shapes example

[Olivier Berger]

Hi.

Pardon me in advance for that "rant"... It's just meant to help clarify
the current OSLC direction. Apologies in advance for the good people
investing efforts in OSLC... I'm just a devil's advocate.


Having had a look at the page below, I tend to think that it misses the
rationale for all this.

And I'm a bit fearful that OSLC turns to a too complex thing to ever
achieve some potential of being a standard in the ALM field, if it
becomes too hard to grasp (at least for the core mandatory concepts).


In particular, I don't quite get it why one needs to reinvent the wheel
with shapes in OSLC when there's already ontologies as OWL to describe
resources on the Semantic Web... for instance.


At least for the first half of the document references below, it isn't
clear. Now, when the format of the query results is described, it may
make more sense... but so hard to grasp at first sight !


I'm a bit afraid of too much over-specification for these
shapes/queries... whereas it isn't even clear if there's a single
consumer available somewhere (OK, I mean in the Open Source landscape)
that supports at least OSLC-CM V1 at the moment.


Ensuring OSLC becomes a standard (an Open one, I mean), means it may not
need to go too far and too fast, in particular in what concerns
over-specification for the core. I strongly believe bottom-up approaches
are interesting, and not so sure this is happening here now.


Pardon me if I haven't fully understood all that's happening (unability
to participate in conf calls certainly doesn't help much, and focusing
on coding (OAuth ATM) prevents me from reading all the docs in time),
but I fear there's some confusion between requirements for one
implementor's requirements design/specs, and specification of an open
standard, that should be at least a little bit understandable by the man
in the street.

I'm doubtful it will be really easy to convince people to implement so
complex specs in existing tools, given the level of complexity I can
feel around here.

Maybe a more KISS approach would be better until more feedback comes
from the grassroots implementors ?

Hope this helps anyway ;)


Best regards,

Le mardi 04 mai 2010 à 17:20 -0400, Dave a écrit :
> To better understand how queries work in the OSLC Core spec today,
> here's an example that shows how to define a blogging service with
> blog entries, blog comments and a query capability that can query
> across both types of resources.
> 
>   http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/OslcCoreQueryDiscussion
> 
> Examples are provided in RDF/XML of these resources:
> - Blog Entry, Blog Comment and Query Resource shapes
> - Service Provider
> - Query response
> 
> Thanks to Arthur for a quick review and the one query URI example in
> the document.
> 
> Feedback is welcome, as are additional query URI examples.
> 
> Thanks,
> Dave
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Oslc-Core mailing list
> Oslc-Core at open-services.net
> http://open-services.net/mailman/listinfo/oslc-core_open-services.net

-- 
Olivier BERGER <olivier.berger at it-sudparis.eu>
http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8
Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut TELECOM, SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry (France)